It’s the political equivalent of homecoming week for conservatives, a chance to revel over President Donald Trump’s return to power and the dismantling of government institutions despised by the MAGA movement.

But as the Conservative Political Action Conference got underway outside Washington on Thursday, the group’s influential chair, Matt Schlapp, was embroiled in another scandal involving allegations of sexual assault against him.

The convention comes a week after new accusations emerged in an article by journalist Yashar Ali that Schlapp, a confidant of Trump, had groped a man at a bar in Virginia a few days earlier during a gathering of conservatives.

Several people have accused Schlapp of sexual assault in the past, allegations that he has denied and his allies have dismissed as an “attempt at character assassination.” Schlapp has not been charged with any crimes related to the accusations. The details of the latest episode were also documented in a report by the Rappahannock County Sheriff’s Office that was obtained by The New York Times. A previous accuser received a $480,000 settlement after dropping his lawsuit against Schlapp, 57, who opened Thursday’s session with his usual conservative bombast.

“Are you glad that America is back on track?” Schlapp said. “Has it been a long, tedious four years? Are you ready to tell the whole world that America is ready to be America again?”

Schlapp appeared onstage with his wife, Mercedes Schlapp, who was Trump’s White House director of strategic communications during his first term and has also played an outsize role at CPAC events. The next part of Thursday’s program featured her moderating a discussion with Vice President JD Vance, the first headliner at the showcase, which was expected to include speeches by Trump and the president’s billionaire ally, Elon Musk.

Schlapp Has Not Addressed Latest Allegations

Matt Schlapp has not publicly addressed the latest allegations against him. A lawyer who represented him in a lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault, one that resulted in the settlement, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. Neither did CPAC.

At CPAC, attendees said they had not heard about the allegations against Schlapp and were instead focused on celebrating Trump.

“I think a lot of times, you find allegations, you dig them up against people because you don’t like them,” said Antonio Chaves, 66, who said he was unaware of the claims against Schlapp. “So those things can be politically motivated, I don’t know.”

In the Feb. 13 report on Ali’s Substack site, The Reset, seven people who were at the bar with Schlapp on the night of Feb. 8 said that they saw him standing uncomfortably close to a group of men. The sources, whose names were withheld because they said that they feared retaliation, told Ali that Schlapp had followed some of the men and stood so close to them that it allowed his body to graze theirs.

The people who were interviewed said that one man’s girlfriend confronted Schlapp, who was accused by the man and several witnesses of grabbing and gripping the man’s genitals while looking directly in the man’s eyes, before Schlapp was briefly escorted out of the bar by a manager. According to the article, Schlapp returned to the bar, which led to a heated confrontation.

A two-page report from the Rappahannock County Sheriff’s Office presented a similar narrative. It said that the owner of a restaurant in Sperryville, Virginia, had called 911 to report that an intoxicated patron had just left the establishment in a BMW after assaulting another person and grabbing their genitals. The report identified Schlapp as the driver of the BMW. It also said that the alleged victim was “declining obtaining warrants.”

The initial article about the episode quickly ricocheted online, drawing the attention of the man who accused Schlapp in a 2023 lawsuit of “aggressively fondling” his “genital area in a sustained fashion” while the two were alone in a car.

Plaintiff Failed in Senate Campaign During Time of Incident

The plaintiff in the lawsuit, Carlton Huffman, was working for the unsuccessful Senate campaign of Herschel Walker in Georgia at the time that he accused Schlapp of groping him.

Less than 20 minutes after the news broke that Schlapp had been accused again of sexual misconduct, Huffman chimed in on the social platform X, calling it the “least surprising headline ever.” And in another post, he said that if anyone needed a good lawyer, they should give his a call.

Huffman, 41, who dropped his lawsuit after receiving the $480,000 settlement last year, did not deny that the posts were his when reached by phone Thursday but declined to discuss the matter.

“We have resolved our differences,” he said of Schlapp. At the time of the settlement, Huffman said his accusations against Schlapp had been the result of a misunderstanding.

In his lawsuit, Huffman said that Schlapp had invited him for a drink in Atlanta after being assigned to drive Schlapp to a campaign event in October 2022 for Walker, the former football star who is Trump’s choice to be U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas. Huffman accused Schlapp of brushing his leg against his at one of the bars they visited. And when he drove Schlapp back to Schlapp’s hotel, the lawsuit said, the CPAC chair grabbed Huffman’s leg and crotch inside the car.

Three people associated with Walker’s campaign told The New York Times at the time the lawsuit was filed that — after Huffman reported the episode the next morning — Schlapp was barred from future campaign events.

Before withdrawing his lawsuit against Schlapp, Huffman had accused CPAC officials of having knowledge of other previous accusations against the group’s chair and failing to act.

On one occasion, the Washington Post reported, Schlapp was accused of stripping to his underwear and rubbing against another person without his consent, during a 2022 fundraising trip to South Florida. In 2017, a CPAC employee accused Schlapp of trying to kiss him against his wishes, the newspaper reported, citing information from Huffman’s lawsuit.

—

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Neil Vigdor/Haiyun Jiang
c. 2025 The New York Times Company