'I can get loud': Adelita Grijalva becomes a voice for sexual assault survivors

New Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva was thrown into the national spotlight and has become an unexpected but unwavering voice for sexual assault victims.

WASHINGTON — Most freshman lawmakers spend their first year, or even years, working on Capitol Hill in obscurity. Not Adelita Grijalva.

Before she even raised her hand to take the oath of office, the Arizona Democrat this fall was fortuitously thrown into the national spotlight and has become an unexpected but unwavering voice for sexual assault survivors.

For 50 days after Grijalva won a special election in a safely blue seat in Arizona, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., refused to seat her while the House was out.

Though the House was out, Grijalva and her would-be Democratic colleagues clashed with Johnson in the halls of the Capitol. Johnson, they argued, was keeping the House out of session to delay Grijalva from becoming the clinching 218th signature to force a vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. The speaker denied that was his intent, insisting she would be seated promptly once Democrats agreed to end the longest shutdown in U.S. history.

The seven-week standoff kept Grijalva and the Epstein story in the headlines and helped build momentum for the near-unanimous passage of a bill to force the Justice Department to release all of its files related to the late convicted sex offender.