Seven years ago almost to the day, Alaina Hampton sent a private letter to then-House Speaker Michael Madigan about sexual harassment from a co-worker that became a turning point in Madigan’s record-setting reign.

“I do not want to hurt any of you — I care very deeply about people involved,” she wrote in the letter, which she later made public. “I only needed to tell you because it has been very painful to experience alone.”

The letter set off a chain reaction that weakened Madigan’s grip on the House Democratic caucus, which began to question how he handled sexual harassment issues.

While Madigan himself was not accused of sexual misconduct, the lingering fallout combined with federal prosecutors naming him “Public Official A” in their burgeoning investigation ultimately cost him caucus support for the speakership and led to his resignation in early 2021.

On Monday, Hampton, a campaign worker once considered a rising star on Madigan’s team, is expected to come face to face with the dethroned speaker when she testifies in his landmark trial, where his organization’s struggle with #MeToo scandals has become front and center for the jury.

While Hampton’s testimony will be limited and the jury will not hear evidence of her specific allegations of sexual harassment, she can offer nitty-gritty insights of how the speaker controlled his political and government operations, including how he distributed campaign funds to select candidates.

In facing off with her ultimate boss, Hampton’s story will come full circle, adding a layer of high drama into a trial where the ending has yet to be written.

Hampton’s testimony will also be a reminder of one of the wilder aspects of Madigan’s downfall: that after decades of meticulous control, the speaker’s #MeToo moment unfolded while the FBI had wiretapped the cellphone of the speaker’s closest confidant, Michael McClain, allowing them to record all the frustration, paranoia and political implosion in real time.

“This is too constant,” McClain lamented about the seemingly never-ending accusations on one wiretapped call played for the jury last week, saying it’s “just gonna keep goin’.”

Madigan, 82, of Chicago, who served for decades as speaker of the Illinois House and the head of the state Democratic Party, faces racketeering charges alleging he ran his state and political operations like a criminal enterprise, scheming with utility giants ComEd and AT&T to put his cronies on contracts requiring little or no work and using his public position to drum up business for his private law firm.

Both Madigan and McClain, 77, a former ComEd contract lobbyist from downstate Quincy who is also charged with racketeering, have pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.

Among the schemes alleged by prosecutors was a 2018 plan arranged by McClain to send money to Kevin Quinn, the Madigan lieutenant who had been forced out for harassing Hampton. A trusted circle would send Quinn payments as he sought other work, according to prosecutors, with Madigan’s knowledge.

But to avoid prejudicing the jury, the judge has barred mention of the specific reason Quinn was cut loose. Instead, when the topic of testimony turned to Quinn last week, Assistant U.S. Attorney Julia Schwartz read a meticulously sanitized stipulation that didn’t even mention Hampton’s involvement.

“In November 2017, Michael Madigan was informed of allegations of misconduct against Kevin Quinn,” she read. “As a result of these allegations, Kevin Quinn was terminated from his position in February 2018.”

Now 35, Hampton works as a political consultant, including for Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi, Cook County Commissioner Bridget Degnan and current school board candidate Ellen Rosenfeld.

With her court appearance pending, Hampton declined comment for this story.

Swiss Army knife?

It’s perhaps a twist of irony that the woman who helped defuse Madigan’s power will testify at his trial — but not about the accusations that undercut him.

The fact that prosecutors wanted to call Hampton as a witness at all was not publicly revealed until the first day of trial last month, when Madigan’s attorneys raised an alarm over what she might say and accused prosecutors of trying to do an “end run” around the judge’s previous ruling limiting testimony about sexual harassment.

As recently as last week, defense attorneys again launched unsuccessful last-ditch efforts to get testimony about Quinn thrown out of the case.

Hampton would be a “Swiss Army knife” of a witness, Madigan attorney Todd Pugh told the judge Wednesday, in that prosecutors want her to testify about many different aspects of the speaker’s operation.

The next day, Pugh argued that concealing payments to someone accused of misconduct is “completely different” from hiding bribes.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu pointed out, however, that the indictment specifically accuses McClain of abetting the criminal enterprise by concealing the true nature of payments to Madigan allies.

“This is dead bang within the allegations of Count 1. No question about it,” Bhachu said, adding that he had a “problem” with the lateness of the objection since prosecutors had disclosed their intentions back in March.

U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey agreed, finding that the Quinn matter was “essentially a reward to help associates of the enterprise who ran into trouble,” which is “squarely within” the racketeering allegations.

How much Hampton is able to tell jurors about Madigan’s operations will be the focus of political intrigue, but clearly Madigan’s team is wary of her testimony.

She knows what it was like to work occasionally inside Madigan’s 13th Ward Southwest Side headquarters and how the speaker’s team deployed campaign workers to knock on doors for long hours.

She also could recap how she was assigned to be an aide to then-Rep. Silvana Tabares, who now is the 23rd Ward alderman, but still reported weekly to Marty Quinn, the Madigan field general.

If asked, she could tell jurors how the Madigan team helped her get a job at a Chicago Heights economic development organization that was run by political allies who made it easy for her to be available for campaign work whenever she was needed.

Another area ripe for prosecutors to explore would be Hampton’s time as a campaign manager for Julia Stratton in a successful 2016 primary challenge against incumbent South Side Democratic Rep. Ken Dunkin, who had aligned himself on key votes with Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, Madigan’s political nemesis.

The primary race became a proxy fight between Madigan and Rauner, setting an eye-popping Illinois House primary spending record of more than $6 million.

Even though the entire political world viewed them as the main players, both Madigan and Rauner subtly played down the zeitgeist of a major showdown between the two partisan enemies.

Madigan’s troops fell in line: Rather than pouring money into Madigan’s hefty campaign war chests to move around, 11 House Democratic incumbents sent most of a $560,000 chunk of cash directly to Stratton.

Madigan allies in labor also poured in support for Stratton.

Two years later, Stratton moved on to be JB Pritzker’s running mate in his 2018 bid for governor, and Hampton made a pitch to run the House Democratic campaign for Stratton’s potential House successor.

When Hampton was frozen out, she alleged Madigan’s camp retaliated for her calling out Kevin Quinn.

“I basically lost everything I worked for because some guy could not control himself,” Hampton said when the Tribune first told her story.

New direction for trial

The trial, which began with jury selection on Oct. 8, is entering its third week of testimony and has gathered steam after a sluggish start.

While much of the testimony has been a rehash of the related “ComEd Four” bribery trial last year, where McClain and three others were convicted in the plot to bribe Madigan, prosecutors last week began playing several never-before-heard recorded calls dealing specifically with the sexual harassment scandal.

Prosecutors are presenting the fallout within the speaker’s political organization as evidence of the lengths that Madigan’s soldiers would go to protect the boss, and to show Madigan had the willingness and power to provide a soft landing for someone close to him who was in trouble.

While it eventually became a public spectacle, the controversy began privately. In February 2017, Hampton reported to 13th Ward Ald. Marty Quinn, a handpicked Madigan acolyte, that his younger brother Kevin had been harassing her for months.

The badgering included a relentless string of texts in which Quinn asked Hampton to go out with him, including one saying he saw a Facebook picture of her in a bikini and describing her as “smoking hot.”

She repeatedly turned down Quinn’s advances, trying to laugh him off at first but also later sent him a blunt message: “I need you to stop…. I’m not interested. I just want to do my work.”

The alderman talked to his brother and the messages stopped. But when Marty Quinn asked Hampton if she wanted to join Madigan’s elite crew of precinct captains, she did not want to risk going to meetings where she might be in contact with Kevin Quinn again.

“I was terrified,” Hampton has recounted previously.

In April 2017, she abruptly left Madigan’s organization and joined the campaign of Marie Newman, who was running in the Democratic primary against U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski, whose father, BIll, was a longtime congressman, ward boss and Madigan ally.

It wasn’t until seven months later, when she was looking to rejoin the speaker’s political team, that Hampton decided to write to Madigan, sending a handwritten letter to his home to make sure he’d see it, and explaining in vivid detail the reasons she left.

With Hampton’s November 2017 letter hitting his mailbox at the height of the national #MeToo movement, Madigan assigned one of his trusted lawyers, Heather Wier Vaught, to investigate her allegations. The two met at a Loop coffee shop and hugged at the end of their discussion but came away with different views of the next steps.

By February 2018, Hampton was unsatisfied with the progress. It wasn’t until she prepared to come forward publicly that Kevin Quinn was quietly pushed out. On Feb. 12, the day after she’d sat down for an exclusive interview with the Tribune, Madigan’s office blasted out a press release about the allegations and Quinn’s ouster, but it did not name Hampton.

Though the move had the makings of Madigan attempting to get ahead of a story, aides said they were unaware of the Tribune interview.

“In November,” Madigan’s statement said, “a courageous woman made me aware that a high-ranking individual within my political operation had previously made unwanted advances and sent her inappropriate text messages.”

Madigan said Wier Vaught’s investigation had concluded Quinn “engaged in inappropriate conduct and failed to exercise the professional judgment I expect of those affiliated with my political organizations and the office of the speaker.”

As Tribune headlines detailed her story, Hampton called a news conference the next day. She later filed a federal lawsuit claiming she was unjustly blackballed and reached a $275,000 settlement with four of Madigan’s political committees. Most of the money went to pay for lawyers and other expenses.

The scandal spirals

If Madigan thought he’d done successful damage control, it quickly became clear the issues within his organization went far beyond Kevin Quinn.

Criticism immediately emerged about the speaker’s ability to stop sexual harassment among a number of notoriously misbehaving aides and close allies.

The constant drip of allegations wore down his standing with House Democrats, especially among women, leading to once-unthinkable calls for him to step down from his role as speaker.

By far the biggest blow to Madigan’s organization came in June 2018 with the toppling of his longtime chief of staff, Tim Mapes, who was accused by a female staffer of sexual harassment over several years and of fostering “a culture of sexism, harassment and bullying that creates an extremely difficult working environment.”

Mapes, who also served as House clerk and executive director of the state Democratic Party, denied the allegations, Madigan cut him loose from all three positions within hours of the accusations coming out at a Chicago news conference.

On a recorded call the day Mapes resigned, lobbyist Will Cousineau, a former political point man for Madigan in the House, sighed heavily several times as he talked with McClain about hiring a crisis management team to try to stop the bleeding.

“Have you talked to Tim?” Cousineau asked McClain at one point. McClain responded that so far, he’d only texted “back and forth” with Mapes.

“I’ve got calls of course into Madigan, but, uh, he’s on lockdown at home, and I figured that if he wants to talk, he’ll call me,” McClain said.

Meanwhile, the jury has not heard that Kevin Quinn was accused of sexual harassment — just that he was fired because of an allegation of “wrongdoing.”

Last week, prosecutors began playing a series of wiretapped recordings showing that despite the Madigan team’s public statements, there was a behind-the-scenes effort going on to kick Quinn some money in his time of need.

But they wanted to keep it quiet.

The plan, as McClain put it to Cousineau on one August 2018 call, was to recruit a few trusted people to pay Quinn $1,000 a month each for six months, or until he was able to find another job.

“And as far as I’m concerned, except for the people signing on, no one else even knows about it except for ‘our friend,’” McClain said, using his code words for the speaker.

Prosecutors next week plan to play another call from later that month in which McClain allegedly gave a progress report directly to Madigan. According to court records that quote the call, McClain told the speaker he had “put four or five people together that are willing to contribute to, uh, help with monthly things for the next six months like I mentioned to ya for (Quinn).”

McClain asked if Madigan wanted to mention it to Quinn’s brother, Ald. Marty Quinn, or “stay out of it.”

“I think I oughta stay out of it,” Madigan allegedly responded.

Minutes after hanging up with the speaker, McClain allegedly called the alderman, who also said on a recorded call he would “rather stay in the dark,” according to court records.

The Tribune has reported that bank records show more than $30,000 in checks were sent to Quinn starting in 2018 from Madigan allies or entities they were associated with, including McClain, Cousineau and three other utility lobbyists: former Democratic Rep. John Bradley, former Madigan staff political director Tom Cullen and Mike Alvarez, a former member of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.

In a call played for jurors last week, McClain told Cousineau that it wasn’t just Quinn: Every so often, he said, Madigan would ask him to quietly take care of people.

“At one point in time I had uh, maybe five consultants working for me,” McClain said. “And, and all they ever really did is give me pieces of paper.”

That, prosecutors have said, was partially a reference to McClain helping funnel payments from ComEd to a different Madigan ally — an allegation at the heart of the racketeering case. The pieces of paper were for tax purposes, something to show the IRS in case of an audit, according to prosecutors.

In that same call, McClain told Cousineau that Michael Kasper, a longtime attorney for Madigan’s organization, had told him the “draft is done” on an internal investigation into Quinn’s misdeeds, “and it doesn’t look too bad.”

“So um, so I decided until that investigation comes out, it’s gonna be real hard to find the guy a job,” McClain said, laughing.

“Agreed, agreed,” Cousineau responded.