Michael Whatley, the NC Republican US Senate candidate, is facing renewed criticism over his relationship with Harvey West Jr., a GOP official who served six years in prison after being accused of raping three minors in 1999.
[This article contains references to sexual assault.]
As Alexis Stadler drove to Raleigh from her home in Union County on Tuesday, she told herself the same thing she tells her two daughters anytime they are scared: “You are brave. You are strong. You can do hard things.”
Stadler, who repeated the phrase over and over during the three-hour drive, was on her way to a press conference where she planned to tell a group of strangers something she had never said publicly.
The presser was organized by the North Carolina Democratic Party to condemn Michael Whatley, the state’s Republican US Senate candidate, for his close ties to Harvey West Jr., a GOP official who served six years in prison after being accused of raping two 14 year-old girls and a 16 year-old girl in 1999.
First at the lectern, Stadler looked over her prepared remarks as the wind tried to snatch the pages from her hands.
Stadler introduced herself, and began.
“Michael Whatley knowingly and repeatedly gave a platform to a convicted child sex offender,” Stadler told the small gathering. “These girls were children.”
Stadler then did the hard thing she had come there to do, telling the group what most of her friends and family never knew.
“One of the survivors of Mr. West’s assault was 16 at the time of assault, only a couple months younger than I was when I was sexually assaulted multiple times by someone I trusted,“ she said. “ That assault shaped me into the woman I am today, and still affects multiple areas of my life.”
Revealing this was hard, but necessary, Stadler said.
“ I’m here as a parent and a voter in North Carolina to say, ‘no more.’ This cannot be allowed to continue. Michael Whatley and every single member of the Republican Party who has cozied up to this child predator must be held accountable at the ballot box in November.”
The ties between West and Whatley, the former chairman of the NC Republican Party, has become a growing issue in Whatley’s Senate race against former NC Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.
But their relationship is years old, not breaking news. The renewed allegations, however, highlight the bigger reality that Stadler drove three hours to convey: Politically connected perpetrators often get to move on after they serve their time, but sexual assault survivors aren’t so lucky.
Despite West’s record, Whatley appointed him to several leadership roles in North Carolina Republican politics, including as the head of the effort to oust Democrat Don Davis from Congress. And his past didn’t prevent West from hosting a popular annual fundraising picnic at his home for North Carolina’s judicial candidates, including NC Supreme Court Justice Paul Newby, Judge Jefferson Griffin, and NC Rep. Sarah Stevens, a legislator who is running for the NC Supreme Court in 2026.
West’s ascension in the state Republican Party came after prison, and he has said he was always open about his past.
“I openly discussed what happened. I openly discussed my time in prison. I openly discussed the charges,” West told the Daily Beast this month.
“I would tell people, ‘If you want me around, I will work and be glad to do so. If you don’t want me, I’ll go on down the road.”
As he helped bring in money for the party, Whatley and other Republican leaders wanted him around.
Messages sent by Cardinal & Pine on Thursday to Whatley’s spokesperson were not returned.
The crimes
In 1999, West was a 28-year-old police officer in Washington, NC., a coastal North Carolina town, when he was arrested and charged with the statutory rape of the three young girls.
He denied raping the children but pleaded guilty the next year to several lesser charges of taking indecent liberties with a child. He served six years in prison, and after he was released, had to register as a sex offender in the state for 10 years.
The 10 years came and went, and his name is no longer listed on the North Carolina sex-offender registry. But his name was there when he first became active in the North Carolina Republican Party, and it was there in 2012, when he was named as an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Tampa.
When the News and Observer broke the story of his arrest record that year, West resigned as an alternate delegate.
Whatley and other party leaders dismissed concerns about West over the years, the Asheville Watchdog recently reported, arguing that the crimes were a long time ago.
In January, North Carolina Sen. Norm Sanderson, a Republican representing seven eastern and coastal counties, told the OuterBanks Insider that West was “an exceptional leader.”
As for the crimes, “I don’t know what the circumstances were in that situation—I’ve never asked,” Sanderson said, “but I know the man now, and whatever happened to him during that time, he’s not that same person.”
In a 2012 interview with the Associated Press, West said he only pleaded guilty to the lesser charges to avoid a much longer prison sentence.
“There’s no way you can defend yourself,” West said.
“This is who I am, and this is what happened to me. I was given my right to vote back, and I have a right to the political process. When do I get to live my life?”
‘It changes your nervous system’
West had served his time, he told the AP, and the issue was behind him.
That might be how it works for those convicted of sexual assault, but it is not at all how it works for survivors, Stadler said.
Sexual assault victims often report facing anxiety, depression, insomnia, post traumatic stress, and eating disorders long after the attack.
“It changes your nervous system fundamentally. You can’t just get over someone physically harming you. Your body remembers it,” Stadler told Cardinal & Pine after the press conference.
“ Even sometimes when you feel like you’ve long worked through something,” Stadler said, “things can trigger you.”
She added: “[West is] out there living his life while the people that he hurt are probably still dealing with that decades later.”
Whatley and others helped West’s rise in the GOP
West may have resigned as a 2012 delegate to the RNC, but he soon began to climb the ladder of GOP politics once again.
West’s fundraising picnics “emerged as a featured campaign stop and major source of judicial campaign money,” Tom Fielder wrote recently in the Asheville Watchdog.
Over the last seven years, every Republican candidate for the state’s Supreme Court has attended West’s picnic and posed for pictures. Rep. Stevens, who will face Democratic NC Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls in November, did not respond to an email message seeking comment.
As West’s fundraising helped Republicans win several high profile judicial races, Whatley appointed him to two important roles over the years, naming him a member of the NC GOP’s Plan of Organization committee, which sets party rules; and as the chair of GOP’s 1st Congressional District committee in 2026, which is in charge of overseeing the fight to defeat Democrat Don Davis in November.
Local news sites, including The Asheville Watchdog and the OuterBanks Insider, helped bring West’s history back into the spotlight this year, and Whatley has not responded to questions from any of them or any other reporters now covering the story.
‘Moral character and trust.’
Not all North Carolina Republicans were happy that West was ascending.
“West’s dark past receded from public view and the few complaints from party regulars were snuffed out by Whatley and West’s other allies, many of whom took the position that he had served his time and cleaned his slate,” Fielder wrote.
The complaints online were harder to snuff.
Long before 2026, several conservative writers and voices in North Carolina harshly criticized West and the political leaders who gave him such a big role.
Margaret Ackiss, a conservative activist who goes by Margo in WNC online, posted on X in 2025 that West was unfit for a leadership position.
“Harvey West, NC 1 District Chair, who lost the super majority and is a convicted felon for indecent liberties with children, is telling a whole group he’s a changed man. He never admits his past. He never owns it,” Ackiss wrote.
“No one should vote this guy as District Chair. No one.”
In 2022, the Daily Haymaker, a site that bills itself as “Common Sense Conservative Commentary for the Carolinas,” also questioned why West was being given such a prominent role in the party despite his arrests.
“Why is the NCGOP so comfortable with elevating a man convicted of taking indecent liberties with a minor?” the publisher Brant Clifton wrote.
The conservative criticism increased this year.
West was “a proficient networker and fund-raiser,” but “should not have held Party office,” Andy Nilsson, a Republican who briefly sought the party’s nomination for US Senate before Whatley entered the race, posted on Facebook this month.
“Even though his crime and incarceration were years ago, … such posts should not have been available to him.”
On March 13, West resigned from the 1st Congressional District committee.
Less than a week earlier, on March 7, the Mecklenburg County Republican Party posted on Facebook that it had “unanimously“ adopted a resolution “urging the North Carolina Republican Party to bar individuals convicted of felony sex crimes from serving as Party officers at the county, district, or state level.”
The resolution, the post said, “makes it clear that those who serve in positions within Mecklenburg County will be held to the highest standards of moral character and trust.”
After all, the Mecklenburg GOP said, “integrity in leadership matters.”
