Ethics Report Isn’t An Indictment of Stan Rosenberg, But of the Senators Who Elected Him

At the time he was elected president of the Massachusetts Senate, Stan Rosenberg had a long-term committed relationship with a man 38 years younger whom he believed to be mentally ill and addicted to alcohol and who had a tendency to text pornographic images of men and make sexually offensive comments to other people.

This is the sort of summation of the Massachusetts Senate ethics committee's 77-page report you aren't likely to see elsewhere, and it's a good reason to see the report not so much as a condemnation of Bryon Hefner (now dealing with criminal charges for purportedly sexually assaulting several men with business on Beacon Hill), and not so much as a rebuke of soon-to-be-ex-senator Rosenberg, who provided Hefner unfettered access to his official email account and apparently managed not to know about Hefner's conduct when plenty of other people on Beacon Hill knew about it.