By Erica C. Barnett
Late last September, Mayor Bruce Harrell put a high-ranking longtime staffer, external affairs director Pedro Gomez, on paid administrative leave after learning that Gomez was under investigation for alleged sexual assault. His accuser, Cheryl Delostrinos, met Gomez through his work at the mayor’s office, and filed a report with the Seattle Police Department five days after the incident in June. Gomez remained on the city’s payroll until January, when the case advanced to the King County Prosecutor’s office, prompting his resignation.
Delostrinos, who spoke with the Stranger earlier this year, was the first woman to make public allegations against Harrell’s longtime staffer. In recent weeks, however PubliCola has spoken with several other women who said many of the circumstances Delostrinos described in her police report were unnervingly familiar, down to the Capitol Hill restaurant where he bought them drink after drink, bragging that he was a part-owner of the business. That restaurant, Mercado Luna (previously known as Mezcalaria Oaxaca) shut down in September.
Two of the women said Gomez offered to mentor them or collaborate on future business opportunities, then took them out for a night of heavy drinking and surprised them by suddenly kissing them at the end of the night. Those two women ended up in what they described as consensual (and overlapping) relationships with Gomez that they now regret. “I ended up feeling very violated,” one said.
Another, who worked with Gomez at the city, said she had a single, nonconsensual sexual encounter with Gomez after a night that began as a meeting to discuss city business and ended in a blackout. “I’d have weird sight, where I could see him sitting on my couch and I was very confused,” she recalled. “Somehow it progressed to the bedroom—it was like flashes of memory. I was just like, ‘There’s no way I can be this drunk.'”
Before he resigned last September, Gomez had worked for the city for more than a decade, including several years as a staffer for former mayor Ed Murray. During the Jenny Durkan administration, Gomez was the small business development director for the city’s Office of Economic Development. He returned to the mayor’s office in 2021, before Harrell even took office, as part of an initial wave of insider hires.
Delostrinos said she decided to go public with her story because she wants to reduce the stigma and shame associated with sexual assault and to help other survivors see that they have options. “I have nothing to be ashamed of. This is something that happened to me,” she said.
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Years before Delostrinos filed her report alleging Gomez had raped her, another woman—a city employee who worked with Gomez directly—had a similar experience, she told PubliCola. The woman has never spoken publicly about what happened to her, but says she was inspired to come forward after news of the allegations came out and she began comparing notes with one of Gomez’ ex-girlfriends, who posted on social media about Gomez.
The city employee told PubliCola Gomez sexually assaulted her after a night of drinking that began as a meeting to discuss her progress at work. She never called the police or pursued charges, she said, because as a young, single mom, she couldn’t afford to lose her job. Additionally, the woman said, she belongs to an immigrant community with a deep-seated “stay in culture” ethos of resolving issues internally, rather than going to police, and a lot of “cultural shame and stigma” around sexual assault.
Unlike the other women, the city employee felt she couldn’t say no to meeting Gomez for drinks to discuss work matters. She said she tried to keep their frequent meetings, which took place after hours, focused on business, but Gomez would often turn the conversation to more personal matters—like their previous romantic relationships, their common background as immigrants, and their obligation to support each other.
“It felt really fucked up—really cheap, really dirty, really sad,” she said. “Because what he’s saying is the truth—it is hard, especially as a young Black immigrant woman. We share some of the character traits that he used to prey on me—like, ‘We really have to make a lane for ourselves,’ and talking about what a big deal he is in the community.”
One evening around 6:00, the woman recalled, she met Gomez at Mercado Luna (then known as Mezcalaria Oaxaca) for what she assumed was a routine meeting to talk about issues at work. Very quickly, though “the conversation swayed away from work, and the drinks kept flowing. … “I’m talking about rounds and rounds, just continuous.” Gomez kept saying things were “‘on the house, because I take care of my people,'” she said. As Gomez watched her drink, she said, he nursed a glass of mezcal, which she had never heard of, telling her it was meant to be “sipped.” As the night wore on, things got “blurry” and “kind of messy.”
She had never expressed any romantic interest in Gomez, the woman said. “There was never a progression, like, ‘Oh my god, I have feelings for him.’ It was never, ever, ever, ever mutual.”
By the end of the evening, she recalled, she was disoriented, weak, and losing patches of time.”It was almost as if my vision had a stutter —it was like, ‘Okay, my body’s betraying me and I’m not sure what’s going on.'” When Gomez offered to drive her home, she thought, “this is a good guy taking care of a coworker who got messy.”
Back at her house, she thought to herself, “There’s no way I can be this drunk.” Things seemed to be happening in flashes: Gomez was on her couch, then, the next minute, in her bedroom, and suddenly she was in the middle of a sex act to which she says she did not consent. The next thing she remembers, she was waking up the next day.
“I have no idea when I went to bed. I don’t know how long he was there afterward or when he let himself out,” she said. The next day, she found her phone and wallet “neatly put in a place that I would never normally put them in my house.”
“I felt gross. I was filled with so much deep shame,” the woman said.
Apart from a text saying something along the lines of “last night got crazy,” she said Gomez “pretended like it never happened.” At one point, she said, he seemed to be “testing” her to see what she remembered about that night. “He was like, ‘Do you remember what tattoos I have?’ And I said, ‘You have tattoos?”
The woman stayed at her job for another year. She said she never confronted Gomez, but there were many times when she would have “random outburst of anger” and lash out at him over text. She felt furious that he wouldn’t acknowledge he had done anything wrong. “I’m pretending like this shit didn’t happen. I didn’t tell a fucking soul. And I know for a fucking fact that he remembered more than I did.”
Shortly before she left her position, the woman said Gomez drove to her home one night and invited himself in. “Conveniently, he had a bottle of mezcal in his car.” The woman said he tried to convince her to “do what we did last time. He was like, ‘I can really trust you. You’re good people because you don’t gossip. You don’t tell other people your business.” She told him her brothers were coming to drop her kids off, she said, and “he was quick to get out of there.”
Because Gomez was involved in Harrell’s campaign and said he could help her get a better position at the city once Harrell was in office, “I didn’t want to burn a bridge, because he really put a heavy emphasis on how a recommendation from him goes so far,” she said. “He said, ‘Bruce is going to win and I’m going to be working for him. … I’ll be the reference of a lifetime.'”
The woman said Gomez never followed through on his promises to help her get a better job at the city, and after she left, she fell into a deep depression. At one point, she went to a barber in the Central District and asked him to shave off her hair—and suddenly found herself facing a placard from the city touting Gomez’ work relocating the shop as part of an anti-displacement effort. “This guy was raving about how much a savior he was. He had a great rapport with all these small businesses, and you felt it,” she sighed.