3 men accused by Nancy Mace in House speech are charged with sex crimes

By MARK WALKER and ISHANI DESAI

U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace’s former fiance and two of his business associates were charged Wednesday with a number of sex crimes in connection with an episode she described at length last year in a speech on the House floor, according to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.

Brendan Patrick Bryant, 53, Mace’s former fiance, was charged with voyeurism. John Douglas Osborne, 46, whom Mace described in her speech as Bryant’s business associate, was charged with first-degree assault and battery and two counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct. Eric Bernard Bowman, 46, another of Bryant’s business associates, was charged with voyeurism, obstruction of justice and publishing the name of a victim of criminal sexual conduct.

The three men were booked into the Sheriff Al Cannon Detention Center in Charleston County. The charges stem from events that occurred on an evening in October 2018 in Charleston, South Carolina.

The victim, a woman who was 23 years old at the time of the incident, had fallen into a pool and later passed out on a couch, where she lay covering herself with a pillow after removing her wet clothes, according to an arrest affidavit. The police described her as drunk and incapacitated, according to the records.

Osborne then performed sex acts on her while Bryant and Bowman watched, according to the documents.

The men discussed who should assault the woman first, and they photographed and recorded the assault, according to the affidavit.

The episode came to light after it was captured on a security system feed, according to the affidavit. A witness monitoring the feed wrote a detailed account of the incident, according to court records.

The charge against Bowman of publishing a victim’s name stems from his posting of the woman’s name along with a video of her on social media, according to the affidavit.

All three men posted their bond and were released Wednesday, according to officials at the jail.

Ryan Schwartz, a lawyer for Osborne, said his client was “innocent of the charges brought against him and intends to defend himself vigorously.”

“We recognize that allegations of this nature are serious, and we will treat this matter with the seriousness it deserves,” Schwartz said.

Bryant denied the accusations at the time Mace gave her speech. A lawyer for Bryant did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. A lawyer for Bowman could not be reached.

In her speech delivered in February last year, Mace accused her former fiance and three other men of raping her and other women. Mace, R-S.C., also said the men had filmed and photographed women and underage girls without their consent.

“You’ve booked yourself a one-way ticket to hell,” she said during the speech, which ran nearly an hour. “It is nonstop. There are no connections. So I and all of your victims can watch you rot into eternity.”

In an extraordinary departure from House custom, she displayed the men’s names and photographs on a placard. Because she spoke on the House floor, her remarks were protected by the Speech or Debate Clause, which shields members of Congress from criminal prosecution and lawsuits over their legislative acts.

Mace offered no evidence for the accusations at the time, though she said she had plenty. A fourth man Mace accused in her speech was not arrested Wednesday.

A victim’s advocate with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division read a statement in court from the woman in the case Wednesday, according to The Post and Courier, a newspaper in the state.

The woman compared her experiences to that of the victim at the center of a sexual assault episode that is roiling Cornell University, and said her world turned upside down after realizing she had been recorded while incapacitated.

“Since then, my sense of safety, privacy and trust has been shattered,” the statement said. “I constantly worry about being watched, followed or secretly recorded.”