The Truth About Sherrod Brown, Exposed

Back in 1974, Vern Riffe, the most powerful Democrat in Ohio, met a 21-year-old Sherrod Brown for the first time. A few hours later he got on the phone furious and demanded to know: “Where the hell did you get that goddamn hippie sonuvabitch?” Riffe served as Speaker of the Ohio House for twenty years. He was a southern Ohio Democrat, a pragmatist, a throwback to what the party used to be before it handed its soul to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and childless cat ladies.

Riffe knew a problem when he saw one. He saw one that day in 1974, and Ohio has been dealing with it ever since.

Riffe later conceded that Brown was shrewd, and he was right. But shrewd is not the same as trustworthy, and fifty years of shrewd has made Sherrod Brown a very wealthy man.

Ohio voters said no to him less than two years ago. They looked him in the eye and said: enough. You had your chance. You are done. But Sherrod Brown looked right back at Ohio and said: I don’t care. He announced he’s running again. Said he “can’t sit on the sidelines.”

Well, there’s a reason voters put him on the sidelines, and what we now know about his record, his family, and his fundraising operation tells you everything about why he needs to stay there.

I know something about Sherrod Brown that most people don’t. We held the same office. I served as Ohio Secretary of State. So did he. I know what that office demands. I know the standard of conduct it requires. I know what it means to hold the public trust in that seat and to treat it as sacred.

Sherrod Brown never treated it that way. He was restless from the start, more interested in the next rung than the work in front of him.

A Yale man who studied Russian in the middle of the Cold War, who somehow wound up running Ohio’s elections, and who never seemed to notice or care what a privilege that was. In 1990, Ohio voters settled the matter. Bob Taft beat him, and the people of this state delivered a verdict that should have given Brown pause for the rest of his political life.

And what a record that office produced.

During Brown’s time as Secretary of State, low-level employees in his office came under suspicion for selling marijuana. An investigation was opened.

No indictments followed, but the cloud was real enough that Bob Taft’s campaign used it to paint Brown’s operation as something considerably less than a professional government office.

The College Republicans drove the point home the way only young conservatives can. They showed up outside Brown’s state office handing out drug-free brownies, made in Columbus, not Colombia. One state employee got sick after ingesting what turned out to be marijuana-laced brownies.

It was a mess that said something about the culture Brown had allowed to take root on his watch.

Always the hippie Yale Russian studies graduate. Vern Riffe saw it coming and said so out loud.

He has been cashing government checks since Richard Nixon was in office and still looks like he cuts his own hair while driving.

But I digress.

Let’s talk about who Sherrod Brown really is, not the image he sells to union halls and editorial boards, but the man behind the flannel shirt.

When his first marriage ended in 1986, it did not end quietly. His wife, Larke Brown, sought a restraining order against him. In a sworn court affidavit, she stated that she was intimidated by her husband and that she was in fear for the safety and well-being of herself and their children due to his physical violence and abusive nature.

These were not impressions or feelings. They were sworn statements made before a court of law by a woman who knew him better than any voter ever would.

This is the man who has spent fifty years wrapping himself in the language of protecting the vulnerable, who lectures the rest of us about dignity and justice, whose own former wife filed sworn court statements describing physical violence and fear in her own home.

The left tells us to believe all women. Funny how quiet they get when the woman is married to a Democrat.

Then there is the matter of his second wife, Connie Schultz. A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest newspaper. A talented writer. Also, for the years her husband served as a United States Senator, a woman using the most prominent opinion platform in the state of Ohio while married to the man whose politics she shared completely.

The Plain Dealer’s own management grew so uncomfortable with the arrangement that they moved her column and restricted what she could write about.

In September 2011, she was caught on video filming Josh Mandel, her husband’s likely Senate opponent, at a Tea Party rally, for a column in which she initially failed to disclose that the man she was investigating happened to be running against her husband. She had to publicly apologize. Shortly after, she resigned from the paper.

Reasonable people can debate where journalism ends and political advocacy begins. But when a senator’s wife holds a column in the state’s largest paper, covers his opponents, shapes public opinion on the very issues he is legislating, and does so for years while the paper struggles to manage the obvious conflict, I think most Ohioans know what to call that arrangement.

The Plain Dealer’s shareholders might want to ask whether they were running a newspaper or underwriting a Senate office.

And while we are on the subject of who Sherrod Brown really is, let’s talk about his voting record. He spent decades selling himself to Ohio as a working-man populist, a blue-collar Democrat who understood the factory floor and the kitchen table.

The flannel shirt.

The gravel voice.

The canary pin on the lapel.

But the National Journal ranked him the most liberal member of the United States Senate, tied for that distinction two years running.

To put that in perspective: even Bernie Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist from Vermont, was considered the more moderate man.

The man who campaigned across Ohio as a kind of left-wing everyman was voting in Washington like a Hollywood awards show. Ohio’s workers deserved a senator who fought for them. What they got was the most liberal voting record in the chamber, dressed up in flannel and sold as something else entirely.

Now let’s talk about the family business.

The Browns have deep roots in public service, and that is true. What is also true is that when things go wrong for a Brown, other Browns tend to show up, and when other people show up to help the Browns, they tend to be the kind of people who have needed quite a lot of help themselves.

Take Charlie Brown. Sherrod’s brother.

Charlie was elected Attorney General of West Virginia in 1984, the state’s top law enforcement officer, the man responsible for holding others to account under the law.

In August of 1989, Charlie resigned abruptly as part of a deal to end a grand jury investigation.

The grand jury was examining allegations that he lied under oath and looking into his campaign finance records going back four years. It was also looking into something considerably more personal: that Charlie had impregnated his secretary, that she had obtained an abortion, and that he had written her a note requesting $50,000 in silence money.

His secretary, Brenda K. Simon, was later indicted on extortion charges. Charlie Brown corrected his testimony after a brief recess and walked out the door a free man.

The lawyer who represented Charlie Brown through all of that was a man named Rudolph DiTrapano.

Remember that name, because it matters more than you might expect.

Now it is 2026. Charlie Brown, the man who resigned as West Virginia’s chief law enforcement officer under a cloud of perjury allegations and a $50,000 hush payment, has put his name on Sherrod Brown’s Senate fundraiser. The brothers, together again, raising money and building toward November. The family business continues.

But Charlie wasn’t the only familiar name on that March 25th invitation. Rudolph DiTrapano, the lawyer who represented Charlie in his darkest hour, has a son named Dante. And Dante DiTrapano was also listed as a co-host of Sherrod Brown’s fundraiser.

Here is Dante’s record.

In March 2006 he was arrested in Florida on cocaine possession charges. The following month he was arrested in Georgia on a suspended license with more cocaine. In June 2006 he was arrested again in West Virginia, this time with no insurance, an expired registration, and an expired inspection sticker, and was indicted on federal felony charges the same month, including possession of firearms as an unlawful drug user.

He pled guilty and was sentenced to six months in federal prison with three years of supervised release. He didn’t finish the supervised release. He was arrested again before it was over, this time for methamphetamine, and failed a drug screening in April 2007. His supervised release was revoked and he was sentenced to two more years behind bars.

His law licenses in both West Virginia and Georgia were revoked.

After his release from prison he was arrested again, this time for forging a signature to obtain a $500,000 loan from a bank, and pled guilty to that as well. And before any of this, while he still held a law license, he had used a client’s power of attorney to steal $1.4 million.

That is the son of the man who saved Charlie Brown. That is who helped host Sherrod Brown’s fundraiser.

Now, who gave Dante DiTrapano his law license back in 2018, after all of that?

Margaret L. Workman, Chief Justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, the same judge who years earlier had presided over the very case in which Rudolph DiTrapano, Dante’s father, had represented Charlie Brown, Sherrod’s brother.

The same Margaret Workman who was impeached by the West Virginia House of Delegates in August of 2018 on charges of maladministration, corruption, incompetence, and neglect of duty.

She and three other justices stood accused of spending nearly three quarters of a million taxpayer dollars on office renovations and misusing state resources, with the Wall Street Journal reporting impeachment recommendations against all four justices. She is also on the March 25th invitation.

Sit with that full picture for a moment. Charlie Brown resigns in disgrace, defended by Rudolph DiTrapano, with his case presided over by Margaret Workman.

Decades later, Workman reinstates the law license of Rudolph’s son Dante, a convicted felon who stole $1.4 million from a client. And then Sherrod Brown, who has known all of these people across all of these decades, invites every one of them to co-host his Senate comeback fundraiser.

I am not calling this organized. I am simply pointing out that when you look at who shows up for the Browns, and who the Browns show up for in return, a picture emerges. You are capable of drawing your own conclusions.

One more name on that invitation: Sheldon Whitehouse, United States Senator from Rhode Island, a man who has built his entire public identity around racial justice and equity, who points his finger at American institutions, corporations, and courts and lectures them about systemic racism.

Sheldon Whitehouse belongs to an all-white private beach club in Rhode Island. When reporters asked him about it, he called it a long tradition, which is the word the progressive conscience of the Democratic Party reached for when asked why he belongs to a club that excludes Black Americans by design.

Sherrod Brown chose this man to headline his comeback.

I held the office of Ohio Secretary of State and I took it seriously. The people of Ohio trusted me with something that belonged to them, and I understood that every day I held it.

Sherrod Brown held that same office, left it in defeat, went to Washington, drew a Senate paycheck for eighteen years, and became a wealthy man on the public’s dime.

And now he is back, flanked by his disgraced brother, the son of his brother’s old defense lawyer, an impeached judge who reinstated that lawyer’s convicted son, and a senator who belongs to an all-white beach club while lecturing the rest of us about systemic racism.

Ohio is shrewder than Sherrod Brown has ever given it credit for. Ohio sees the record. Ohio sees the company he keeps.

Ohio sees what happens when a Brown gets in trouble, who lines up to help, and what tends to flow back in the other direction.

Ohio said no less than two years ago, and in November 2026, Ohio needs to say it again: Final. Permanent. Done.

And Sherrod, for the love of God, find a decent barber!