US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland has been reportedly accused of sexual misconduct by three different women who interacted with or worked for him in his previous job as a boutique hotel tycoon.

According to a new story published in ProPublica, Sondland, who is currently a key figure in President Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry, physically assaulted or exposed himself to women that spans seven years between 2003 and 2010. One women, a work associate of Sondland’s, also said he retaliated after she spurned his advances, screaming at her over the phone about her supposedly poor job performance.

Sondland denies all three allegations.

Two of the reporters who covered the story, ProPublica’s Julia Silverman and Portland Weekly’s Marty Patali, appeared on CNN on Wednesday night to discuss what their team discovered.

“We started working on the story back in October when Sondland’s role in the impeachment hearings was very different,” Patali explained. The genesis of the investigation came from Portland Weekly owner, Nicole Vogel, who is one of three women claiming to have been attacked by Sondland. But because of Vogel’s relationship to the alt-weekly, Patali said he wanted a outside partner to help him report the story. “We decided pretty quickly that if we were going to pursue the story we would need to bring on an independent, investigative partner and we did that with ProPublica and they’ve been a fantastic reporting, fact-checking and writing partner in this story.”

“We spent the better part of two months reporting these stories,” Silverman noted. “We checked and re-checked everything and we spoke to multiple people for each woman who could confirm that they were told the story at the time, so verifying a contemporaneous account.”

Sondland’s lawyer and spokesperson, Jim McCarthy, also appeared on CNN to deny the report’s claims.

“I’m amazed with those reporters say they were thorough and I’ve tried to be in contact with Ms. Silverman for many weeks now and she has refused to share even basic details” about the incidents, McCarthy said. “We didn’t have an opportunity to hear any of the fundamental basics of it until just a couple of days ago with a 24-hour deadline. It was horrendously irresponsible journalism. And the fact that their own boss is the primary source for the story is appalling, that’s a brazen conflict of interest.”

CNN host Bianna Golodryga countered by noting that was the reason ProPublica was brought in, to mitigate Patali’s conflict of interest and independently corroborate the women’s claims.

“Both of the reporters you just had on spent many weeks calling dozens and dozens of employees of Ambassador Sondland’s company, waving innuendo at them and trying to solicit similar kinds of stories and their own boss is the primary source,” McCarthy replied, before falsely claiming that Silverman and the other ProPublica reporters are paid by Vogel. “She signs their checks, to pretend that that’s somehow objective journalism is ridiculous.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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