Congressional candidate is raped repairing her campaign signs

It was just after 2 a.m. on a pitch-black Friday morning when Bernadette Greene-Placentia’s life changed. The Democratic candidate for Congressional District 8 strolled across a parking lot to repair a damaged campaign sign. It was a routine she’d followed all summer. This time, she only made it a few yards. 

An attacker smashed her over the head. She blacked out. She woke up to find a strange man on top of her. 

Greene-Placentia struggled to open her eyes. She felt a sharp pain below her waist. The attacker was pulling his penis out of her. 

She heard him mumble something like, “-ic bitch, not a very good fuck,” which her mind filled in as “Democratic bitch,” she recalled. She wasn’t sure that was exactly what he said. 

One leg was out of her jean capris. She wore brand-new tennis shoes and a campaign t-shirt. Another man came over. Greene-Placentia felt his weight nudging her left leg further apart. She began swinging her foot at him. “Not even worth it,” she heard the man say as he moved away. He wore black boots and had small feet, she recalled. 

The two men left Greene-Placentia face down in the parking lot. The hatch of her silver Jeep Grand Cherokee was still open. The car was still running. She heard music. 

She doesn’t remember pulling up her pants or picking herself off the asphalt parking lot. She doesn’t remember closing her Jeep’s hatch and putting her foot on the gas. She doesn’t remember pulling her car into the driveway and collapsing into her bed. 

“It’s just these little tiny flashes of things that I do remember,” Greene-Placentia said in an interview with Phoenix New Times. “As much as I don’t want to remember, I’ve tried very, very hard to remember more stuff. But that’s where I’m at.”

Greene-Placentia is a longtime long-haul trucker who moved to the district with her husband in 2017. She’s challenging MAGA Republican Rep. Abe Hamadeh for his congressional seat. The ultra-red district covers a large swath of the northwest Valley, including north Glendale, Peoria, Surprise, Sun City, and up into Anthem. 

She’s gone out dozens of times in the middle of the night to repair campaign signs throughout the campaign. Sometimes her husband, Alex Placentia, joins her; other times, a campaign volunteer tags along. It’s been a successful way for Greene-Placentia’s campaign to put up signs while avoiding the heat and traffic. 

She doesn’t do it anymore. 

She believes she could have suffered a concussion during the altercation, which would have been her third one, although she didn’t seek medical attention. “I just wanted to forget it,” she said. Her body was covered with bruises from the assault, including dime-sized ones from fingers and more on the back of her arms and above her butt.

She initially didn’t want to report what happened either. She was “embarrassed” and just wanted to “forget it happened,” she said. But on the campaign trail, Greene-Placentia is constantly speaking about fighting for Arizonans, “and I didn’t feel like I could keep saying that if I weren’t also fighting for women that are victims of sexual assault,” she said. 

She told her campaign staff what happened that Sunday and her husband the next day. She reported the assault to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office two weeks later. She told deputies that the sexual assault occurred near 99th Avenue and Bell Road in Sun City, according to the police report.

“It was a really huge area. Based on the fact that I wasn’t gone long, we figured it was somewhere in Sun City, or maybe Surprise,” she said. “I have over 250 signs up, and at some point, all 250 have needed repairs or something. On any given night, there could be 30 or 40 stops where we either put up a sign or fixed a sign.” 

New Times spoke with six of Greene-Placentia’s family, friends, campaign staff, and even her landlord, whom she was with in the days following the assault.

‘Something’s not right’

The democratic congressional candidate essentially went “missing in action” for two days following the assault, according to her campaign manager, Isaiah Lopez, and her husband, Alex Placentia. 

“I did talk to her a couple of times,” Placentia told New Times. “I distinctly remember I said to her, ‘something’s not right. You’re being weird or something.’” 

She was staying at her in-district Sun City apartment, while her husband called her several times from their home in Surprise. After redistricting in 2023, their home in Surprise was moved 1.6 miles outside of CD-8, but Greene-Placentia still wanted to live and vote in the district. 

When Placentia called, she was in the bath multiple times and was “being nauseous on the phone,” he said. According to the police report, Greene-Placentia vaginally bled for three days after the assault. 

It was “odd” for Placentia to go two days without seeing his wife. He admitted his feelings were hurt and wondered if she was hiding something from him, he recalled. 

Greene-Placentia’s landlord, Annarose Lily, was the only person who saw her during her two-day blackout. One or two days after the assault, Lily tried to check on her outside the apartment as “she looked like she was gonna fall over,” but Greene-Placentia brushed it off, Lily said. She didn’t tell Lily the full story until a few days later. 

On Sunday morning, a campaign volunteer picked Greene-Placentia up and drove her to a canvass launch in Chandler. She had a terrible headache. Craig Beckman, her director of communications, and Lopez could tell something was “abnormal.” Lopez hadn’t heard from her since Thursday night. 

“We knew something was up,” he said, noting it was odd as “sometimes I think I talk to her in my sleep with how much we talk.”

Her campaign team pulled her aside. Beckman and Greene-Placentia sat in the front seat of her Grand Cherokee, while Lopez stood outside the car door, attempting to run the event at the same time. She was “visibly upset” and told Beckman that she’d been raped by two men while fixing signs, but didn’t have a clear memory, Beckman said. Greene-Placentia told Lopez moments later. 

“I just tried to console her in any way I could,” Beckman said. “I spent quite a lot of time explaining to her that this isn’t her fault. Just because she put herself in a vulnerable position doesn’t give a man an excuse to physically or sexually assault her.” 

Beckman and Lopez sent Greene-Placentia home to rest and recuperate. The next day, she told Placentia what happened from her Sun City apartment. “I honestly didn’t know what to do,” Placentia said of his reaction when he heard the news. “Being a husband, I wanted to beat the hell out of somebody.” 

That same day, Greene-Placentia reached out to Greg Freeman, a friend whom she’d met working in politics and the secretary of the state Democratic Party. They spoke over the phone for nearly 45 minutes. She was “obviously very unsettled” and felt “incredible amounts of discomfort and shame,” Freeman told New Times. “She’s sworn me to secrecy. I kept her confidence, and it was really, really hard. It was probably one of the worst days of the year.”

She also shared what happened to her with state Rep. Stephanie Simacek, another local political friend, over coffee in early September. 

“I thought I was gonna throw up. I felt sick to my stomach, and it was extremely disturbing,” Simacek said. “It was a big wake-up call for me. I think oftentimes, as candidates and electeds, we think that it’s not going to happen to us.” 

Crying times, angry times

In the days and weeks following the assault, Greene-Placentia described herself as a “very angry person,” and her husband said she went through “crying times and angry times.”

She told her husband and campaign manager, “I want a fucking rematch. I want to call them out. I want to like go on TV and say ‘Let’s go again and don’t come at me from behind,’” she recalled. Her campaign even had a staff meeting at a gun range because she wanted to shoot something. 

“I know that sounds crazy,” Greene-Placentia told New Times. “But I was just mad.” 

Despite initial hesitation and fear over re-victimization, Greene-Placentia reported the assault over the phone to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office more than two weeks after the rape. The next day, two sergeants came to Greene-Placentia’s Sun City apartment to speak with her. Dave Moyer, a MCSO spokesperson, declined to comment on the status of the investigation, since it’s ongoing.

“I need to let women know that it’s okay to talk about it,” Greene-Placentia said. “We’re asking people to stand up and donate or volunteer. We’re asking those folks to be uncomfortable, as Secretary Fontes says; then I have to be willing to be uncomfortable too.”