A casino cocktail waitress told police a drunken U.S. Rep. Jim Gibbons grabbed her, shoved her against a wall and threatened her in a Las Vegas parking garage after she rebuffed his advances at a restaurant Friday night.
But Chrissy Mazzeo, 32, told investigators she did not want to press charges against the Reno congressman "mainly because of who he is. 'Cause of who he is, and I just don't want to go up against something like that."
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Gibbons, 61, the Republican candidate for governor, denied her version of the story and told police he merely helped a woman to her vehicle and grabbed her arm when she tripped and fell.
"She tripped," he told detectives. "I grabbed her to straighten her up. I said, 'Are you OK?' She walked away. I walked away. And I went into the, into the hotel, came up here and went to bed. And that's the end of the story."
Though Gibbons' Democratic opponent, state Sen. Dina Titus, declined to comment on the allegations, a political analyst said the incident could change the dynamics of the governor's race in the last stages of the campaign.
"It's a distraction even if it's not true," creating damaging headlines and overshadowing other news about the race, said David Damore, a political scientist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "If there's any truth to it, it brings his judgment into question in a very big way. It could be really bad for him."
Damore said that for any candidate to have a drink with an unknown member of the opposite sex three weeks before an election was an error in judgment.
"Maybe she was setting him up or whatever, but he made himself vulnerable," he said.
The incident began Friday at McCormick & Schmick's restaurant near Paradise and Flamingo roads, where Gibbons and his political campaign adviser, Sig Rogich, had dinner with six campaign donors. After the donors left, the two men planned to leave about 8 p.m. but went back inside because of the heavy rains that were soaking the parking lot. Inside they sat down with a lawyer and legal secretary whom Rogich knew because they work in his building.
At some point, Mazzeo and her friend, Pennie Puhek, approached the table. Puhek knew one of the women, and she and Mazzeo pulled up chairs and "basically invited themselves" to the booth, Rogich said.
But Mazzeo told police that Rogich and Gibbons invited them over after Puhek bought them a round of drinks.
Mazzeo, a cocktail waitress at Wynn Las Vegas, sat next to Gibbons. She told police that he flirted with her throughout the evening, put his hand on her thigh and played footsie with her, according to a police report.
"He just, just started talking about how his, his marriage wasn't successful and how he had two children," Mazzeo told police. "He was married for 20 years and that, uh, marriage wasn't everything that it was cracked up to be, and then that's when he gave me his card."
Gibbons told her she could campaign for him, she said. Mazzeo said she tried to change the subject and move away from Gibbons when he touched her.
"He put his hand on my leg," she said. "And then I just scooted closer to Pennie."
Mazzeo told police that when she moved away, Gibbons said, "I wish I could have that kind of affection from her."
At some point, patrons at a nearby table started taking pictures of Gibbons with their camera phones.
"So I presume they knew who I was," he told police. "They were, you know, gonna sell it to, uh, you know, the, the trade magazines and say, 'Here's Jim Gibbons out cavorting with the women.' You know? And I just laughed at it. I said, 'Well, you know, I'm 60, close to 62 years old, married, this isn't gonna fly very far.' But I didn't think much about it. But they said something about it. And I looked over and I didn't see 'em taking any pictures, so I didn't think much about it."
Shortly after the picture taking, Rogich suggested he and Gibbons leave, Mazzeo said.
Gibbons then said he was staying at the nearby Residence Inn by Marriott, and "we could basically crawl back to his hotel room," Mazzeo said, explaining to police that she was not sure whether Gibbons was asking her to go to his room.
Rogich and Gibbons went outside, but Rogich went back in to pay the bill, which totaled $302.12. Gibbons waited outside. Mazzeo said she stayed at the table with Puhek for 15 or 20 minutes before walking outside, where she ran into Gibbons.
"Are you looking for me?" she said he told her.
"No," she replied.
Gibbons offered to help her find her truck, which was parked in the parking garage behind the restaurant. A witness told police he saw Gibbons walking toward the garage with Mazzeo following several feet behind him.
Mazzeo told police they walked in silence to the garage, but when they got to the garage elevator, Gibbons grabbed her arms and pushed her against a wall.
"I thought he was joking at first," she told police. "That's when he said, um, he, he said, 'You have two choices.'"
Gibbons told her she could try to leave or do what he said, she told police.
"Are you really, you know, rape me at this time?" Mazzeo said she told Gibbons. "That was the time, and I said, 'Are you serious?' I said, 'I, I just survived cancer for 11 years, and you're really going to do this right now?" she told police. "And he said, 'Lucky you. You survived cancer.'"
Mazzeo said she then saw three people walking by and ran away. She made the first of three 911 calls that night at 10:23 p.m.
Mazzeo, breathing heavily and sounding frazzled, nervous and drunk, slurs her words and struggles to make coherent sentences.
When the 911 operator asked her where she is, Mazzeo talks about her job and mistakenly says she "went on a date with Jim Gibson" (who lost the Democratic gubernatorial primary to Titus), though later she clarified the man was Gibbons. "I'm not lying about (expletive)."
In between breaths and words, Mazzeo laughed nervously.
"OK. Why are you laughing?" the 911 operator asks.
Mazzeo responds: "I am not laughing. I'm running. And if you don't know my personality, I apologize."
The 911 operator continues to quiz Mazzeo about her location. Mazzeo first says she is at a Starbucks on Paradise but later says she is at a La Quinta Inn.
"OK. What do you need police for right now?" the operator asks.
"He just assaulted me in the ... (expletive) goddamn police ... in the goddamn (expletive) parking lot," Mazzeo says.
Mazzeo calls police again 29 minutes later. In that call, she tells the operator she is at the La Quinta Inn, then quickly changes her location to a Starbucks bathroom.
"Well, I never even went into the La Quinta, I was just running down the street," she tells the operator.
The operator asks how far she is from La Quinta and Mazzeo says she is going there. The operator asks whether Mazzeo sees an officer, and she responds, "Yeah, right there," and the call ends.
When Mazzeo makes the third 911 call 22 minutes later, she's in front of the Gordon Biersch Brewing Co. She sounds calmer and is more coherent.
She spends nearly 10 minutes talking to a 911 operator, recalling the story she would tell investigators in later interviews.
"He kept telling me I just (expletive) up, and then I started running," Mazzeo says. "But I'm hoping that there are elevator cameras that show the assault."
Investigators checked the cameras in the garage but found that the cameras were not recording at the time and that surveillance cameras at the restaurant had not worked for a year.
Mazzeo tells the operator that both she and Gibbons had been drinking.
"He didn't seem like he was under the influence of anything other than alcohol, correct?" the operator asks.
"Oh, probably power," Mazzeo says laughing. "But I don't know."
Officers soon arrived and found Mazzeo.
Investigators noticed scratches on Mazzeo's shoulder and back, but she did not explain how she got them.
On Saturday, Mazzeo told police she did not want to press charges. She told police that no one pressured her to change her mind, but she was a single mother with a 3-year-old daughter and worried the incident would become a "three-ring circus."
Mazzeo declined to comment about the case on Wednesday and referred calls to her attorney, who could not be located.
"I was told not to talk to anyone," she said.
Mazzeo filed for bankruptcy last year, claiming more than $110,000 in debt, including credit cards, medical bills and student loans.
Puhek declined to comment earlier this week.
Las Vegas police Deputy Chief Greg McCurdy said police would not have filed criminal charges even if Mazzeo had pursued them because they found no evidence to support her story. Investigators would have referred the case to the district attorney's office for review, he said.
"We have her word. We have his," McCurdy said. "Somewhere is the truth."
On Wednesday, Rogich said Gibbons, who was campaigning in Mesquite and Laughlin, would not be available to tell his side of the story.
In his interview with police, Gibbons denied flirting with Mazzeo.
"We talked about just generalities," he said. "And it, it was a very pleasant and, she's a certainly, a nice lady. ... I don't have any problem with her. She's a wonderful young lady, and, uh, you know, I'm, I'm surprised that, uh, she would think that I would do something wrong. Uh, and I certainly if, if, you know, if there's an opportunity for me to apologize to her I'd be happy to do that. If she thought that would help. Uh, but, you know, I just thought we were all having a good time with casual conversation."
He said his leg inadvertently might have bumped Mazzeo's under the table, but he denied touching her in any other way. She touched him, he said, at times putting her hand on his arm.
When he saw her outside the restaurant, Gibbons offered to help her find her truck though she had been drinking.
"She was not, uh, in, she, I, I don't, uh you know, like I said, uh, she might have been tipsy," he told police. "Uh, she didn't walk in a straight line. That's for sure. Cause she, you know, bump into ya when you're walking along and, you know, I didn't think anything of that. And just helping this lady, and that was all."
"Gosh I learned an important lesson, never to offer a helping hand to anybody ever again."
Rogich denied Gibbons made flirtatious remarks, told dirty jokes, touched Mazzeo's leg or played footsie with her in the restaurant.
In a statement to police, waitress Julie Vick said that everyone at the table had been drinking heavily and that the atmosphere was "flirty -- dirty jokes, etc."
As for how the evening ended, Rogich said, "I walked outside. Jim walked ahead of me. I went back in. I went to the bathroom. I paid the tab. I went back outside. Jim was gone. Chrissy was gone."
The three other women and Rogich went to their cars, Rogich said.
Rogich said the allegations are totally inconsistent with the personality of Gibbons, whom Rogich has known since the late 1980s.
"It's impossible," Rogich said. "Anyone who knows him knows it's laughable. This is a man who gets kidded about being so straight. He very rarely drinks, and even then it's a glass of wine with dinner. He never goes out without a coat and tie because he takes his position seriously. He's been married to the same woman for 20 years, and he tells people they have a great marriage."
State Sen. Bob Beers, chairman of the Republicans' Victory 2006 effort, agreed the allegations strained credulity because it would be "highly out of character for the Jim Gibbons I know."
Beers described Gibbons as "reserved, formal, very serious, not flirtatious, very professional."
In Washington, where Gibbons has spent his professional life for the past decade, he is seen as a private person with few personal connections to others in the Nevada delegation and in Congress, sources from both parties said.
"People either loved him or were not particularly fond of him," said a former congressional aide who is a Republican. "He was definitely a maverick, like the John McCain of Nevada, off doing his own thing."
Said a Democrat: "It was almost like a running joke. Does somebody know Jim Gibbons? Nobody knows Jim Gibbons."
Stephens Washington Bureau chief Steve Tetreault contributed to this report.
