Lonna Drewes stepped before cameras Tuesday at a Beverly Hills law office and accused Rep. Eric Swalwell of raping and strangling her in a hotel room eight years ago.
“He raped me, and he choked me. And while he was choking me, I lost consciousness. And I thought I died. I did not consent to any sexual activity,” Lonna Drewes told reporters at the press conference.
The East Bay Democrat had announced his resignation from Congress just the day before. Drewes’s account lands on top of a pile of allegations that have, in the span of roughly a week, dismantled Swalwell’s congressional career and his run for California governor.
Drewes said she crossed paths with Swalwell three times in 2018 through mutual friends. He “spoke repeatedly about his ability to make connections” that could benefit her software company, she said. She was also weighing a run for Beverly Hills City Council at the time. The third meeting, she said, is when the assault happened. She said she didn’t see him again after that night. Her legal team showed reporters a photo they said captured one of the earlier meetings, taken at the launch of a Beverly Hills restaurant that news accounts place in late April 2018.
She believed she’d been drugged.
Attorney Lisa Bloom announced plans to file a formal complaint with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office later that same Tuesday. Bloom said the filing would include text messages between Drewes and Swalwell, journal entries Drewes says she wrote around the time of the alleged assault, and names of people she confided in afterward. Drewes also told reporters she sought therapy at a survivor center in Connecticut in the wake of the encounter.
Swalwell’s attorney, Elias Dabaie, didn’t return requests for comment Tuesday. Swalwell has denied what he characterized as “serious, false allegations against me” and said he intends to keep fighting them. He’s also apologized to his wife for “mistakes in judgment I’ve made in the past.”
The speed of the collapse is worth sitting with for a moment.
A week before Drewes spoke, Swalwell was one of three top-tier Democratic candidates for governor of California. Then last Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a former staff member said Swalwell solicited oral sex from her while she was on his payroll and sexually assaulted her on two separate occasions when she was too intoxicated to consent. Hours later that same Friday, CalMatters reported that CNN had published the same staffer’s account alongside accounts from three additional women. One said he kissed and touched her without her consent. Two others alleged he sent unsolicited messages.
Support didn’t erode. It dropped out from under him.
By Sunday night, Swalwell had suspended his campaign for governor. Monday brought his announcement that he’d be leaving Congress. Now, on Tuesday, Drewes made her accusation publicly, backed by an attorney, a planned sheriff’s complaint, and physical documentation her lawyers say corroborates her timeline.
What’s emerging isn’t a single allegation that can be contextualized away. It’s a pattern, described by multiple women across different contexts and years, that Swalwell’s camp hasn’t been able to address with anything beyond denial. In 2026, with the governor’s race already consuming Sacramento’s political oxygen, the story has taken on a gravity that can’t be attributed to any single news cycle.
Drewes isn’t an anonymous source. She’s named, she’s represented by Attorney Lisa Bloom, and she’s going on record with law enforcement. That changes the legal and political math in ways that Swalwell’s team will have to reckon with, regardless of how aggressively they push back.
The Beverly Hills City Council race Drewes once considered. The software connections Swalwell offered. A hotel room in 2018. A therapy center in Connecticut. These aren’t abstractions. They’re the details that make an account real, and they’re the ones investigators will be looking at.