What the bill actually does
HB 1633 is the simplest bill you will ever read.
It requires hospitals, police departments, crisis centers, and prosecutors’ offices to hand a sexual assault survivor a palm card. A wallet-sized card. On the card is a list of the rights that survivor already has under existing New Hampshire law.
Rights that are already on the books. Rights the legislature already passed. Rights that, in forty-four other states, somebody figured out how to put on a card.
That’s it. That’s the whole bill. A card.
Now here’s the number that should end every conversation: according to the NH Department of Justice itself, about one thousand New Hampshire residents a year go to a hospital after an assault and leave with zero evidence collected — not because they didn’t qualify, not because they didn’t want it, but because nobody told them they could have it.
A thousand. A year. In a state of 1.4 million.
HB 1633 has passed the full New Hampshire House three times. The most recent vote was 340 to 1.
The lone “no”? The former chair of the only organization that has ever opposed this bill — the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. The NHCADSV. Remember that name. We are going to use it.
The lie that killed it
In her own op-ed in InDepthNH this week, Rep. Read reports that before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, senators were told — repeatedly, by NHCADSV lobbyists — that HB 1633 was a bill to let survivors take rape kits home from the hospital.
Let me say that again with my indoor voice so we can all savor it.
They told grown, elected state senators that this bill was about letting assault survivors walk out of an ER with a biohazard box of their own forensic evidence tucked under one arm like a Costco rotisserie chicken.
That is not in the bill. It has never been in the bill. There is no good-faith reading of this legislation that gets you there.
And yet that is what the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee — a man with a gavel and a staff and presumably reading glasses — believed he was hearing testimony about. Ellen met with him the next day. He confirmed it.
So let’s line the receipts up at the bar, shall we.
* Four sexual assault survivors got three minutes apiece to testify. Twelve minutes total.
* The opposition — NHCADSV, its affiliates, and a representative of the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office — got twenty minutes. Plus a second bite at the end.
* The lobbyists were telling senators the bill did something it does not do.
* The one House vote against the bill belongs to the former chair of that same organization.
Ten times the airtime of actual survivors. For people spreading a lie.
Banned for a word
After the hearing, Ellen — herself a sexual assault survivor, a fact she disclosed publicly this week with more courage than most men in this state muster in a lifetime — stood in a hallway and said one word.
F**k.
For that one word, the Speaker of the New Hampshire House has made her the first Representative in state history to be formally banned from the chamber, the gallery, and her own office anteroom on non-session days.
The Revolution happened in this state. The Civil War happened. Prohibition. Every scandal, every affair, every hot-mic moment, every inappropriate handshake in a statehouse bathroom in Concord since 1776.
No representative has ever been banished from the building. Until Ellen. For a word.
The person who reported her? A lobbyist named Jodi Grimbilas, associated with NHCADSV. The same organization running the disinformation campaign. The same organization whose former chair cast the only “no” in the House.
Thirty minutes before any of this happened, I texted the Agents of Chaos chat:
“They want you to be emotional to frame you as crazy.”
Ellen thumbs-upped it. Then the Speaker proved it.
New words for hysterical woman. Same old play.
Follow the money
Now pour a second drink. Because this is where the tragedy becomes a documented corruption story.
I have in my possession a draft letter dated April 17, 2026, addressed to New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella. It is written in Rep. Ellen Read’s voice, prepared with accountability researcher Claire Best, and copied to Concord City Councilor Stacey Brown and to me.
Here is what that letter lays out.
One. A senior member of the NH Attorney General’s office — the draft letter names Jeffrey Strelzin — personally testified against HB 1633 before the Senate. His cited reason? That the bill might cause “unintended consequences.” The unintended consequence, Mr. Strelzin, is that a survivor might know her rights.
Two. According to public Secretary of State campaign finance records cited in the draft letter, Jodi Grimbilas made campaign donations in 2023 and 2024 to members of the same State Senate voting on the bill her organization opposes.
Three. NHCADSV is a 501(c)(3). Under federal law, a 501(c)(3) is categorically prohibited from using state and federal funds to lobby on legislation. NHCADSV receives substantial public funding. Straw donations — personal contributions made on behalf of an entity that can’t legally donate itself — are illegal. The draft letter raises the question of whether these donations require scrutiny on both fronts.
Four — and this is the one that stops my breath — NHCADSV lobbied to pass the original survivors’ rights law in 2016. They wrote it. They pushed it. They cheered when it passed.
And then they spent three years fighting the bill that would actually tell survivors those rights exist.
They secured rights they did not want anyone to know about.
If you ever wanted gatekeeping distilled into a single sentence — that’s it.
The pattern
This is not one bill. This is a pattern.
It goes like this. A woman in New Hampshire civic life speaks plainly. She refuses to play ball — to borrow Ellen’s phrase. She has the wrong manners, the wrong friends, the wrong questions.
She is called erratic. Unhinged. Inappropriate. Emotional. Hysterical. Chaotic.
None of those words are ever about the bill. None of them are ever about the merits. None of them are ever about the evidence.
They are, every time, about the woman.
And the machine funded to protect her is the same machine now working to shut her up.
What we do now
You are not the kind of reader who finishes a piece like this and goes back to doomscrolling. So:
One. Read Ellen’s op-ed at InDepthNH.org. Share it.
Two. Call your state senator. Ask whether they were told HB 1633 was about “take-home rape kits.” Ask who told them. Send me the answer.
Three. Look up Jodi Grimbilas on the NH Secretary of State campaign finance database. The donations are public. See who received her money. Ask those senators, in writing, how they voted on NHCADSV-opposed legislation without disclosing the conflict.
Four. Ask AG John Formella’s office why Jeffrey Strelzin testified against a survivors’ rights bill on behalf of a private nonprofit. Ask in writing. Demand a written answer.
Five. The IRS has a form for reporting suspected 501(c)(3) lobbying violations. It’s Form 13909. Google it. File it. The legal scrutiny of NHCADSV’s practices will not happen unless citizens with standing do the paperwork.
Six. And if you are a person who has ever walked out of a New Hampshire hospital wondering why nobody told you what you were entitled to — I see you. Ellen sees you. The 340 representatives who voted yes three times see you.
The ones who killed it? The organization that fought it? The prosecutor who warned of “unintended consequences”? The Speaker who banned the woman who fought for you?
They don’t see you. Yet.
A right kept secret
Ellen ended her op-ed with eight words that I cannot stop turning over in my mouth.
“A right kept secret is not a right.”
A law kept secret is not a law.
A donation kept secret is not a donation.
A woman kept silent is not silent — she is being silenced, and there is a verb there, and a perpetrator there, and a choice somebody is making every day to keep her from speaking.
So we speak. Even when it’s one word. Even when it’s in a hallway. Even when the group chat is called Agents of Chaos and the state has it out for us and our hands are shaking at 1:58 on a Thursday afternoon.
We speak.
F**k.
Until there are no more secrets.
The full episode is above. Hit play, pour something, and bring a notebook.
The Speakeasy is published by NHCEA Inc. — the New Hampshire Coalition for Ethics and Accountability. Independent journalism with a spine. If you want more of it, become a paid subscriber. That’s how mama keeps the lights on, keeps her son fed, and keeps the statehouse nervous.
The door is always open. The tab is always running. And the truth — the truth is on the house.
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