On the second day of a civil jury trial in Tallahassee in which state Rep. Fabián Basabe is facing allegations of sexual harassment by a former legislative aide and an intern, the Miami Beach Republican on Tuesday denied the allegations and testified that the ex-aide “was always a loser.”

The former aide, Nicolas Frevola, has claimed that Basabe slapped him across the face and told him to stand in a corner at a private event in January 2023, and that, the month prior, Basabe slapped his butt without his consent while they attended an elementary school career day.

After an investigation into the first incident commissioned by the Florida House came back with a finding of “inconclusive,” Basabe posted a social media statement referring to Frevola and his mother as a “conning, scheming mother and son duo” and decrying a “false accusation” made by “lazy, entitled, unscrupulous, self-involved, ungrateful, lying scum.”

Frevola’s mother, Janette, who is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit and is accusing Basabe of defamation, sobbed on the witness stand Tuesday as she described the toll that Basabe’s alleged actions took on her and her son.

“This man has destroyed his life for no reason at all,” said Janette Frevola, a former police officer who ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for the Florida House in 2022 in Central Florida.

Leon County Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh sent the jury out of the courtroom for a recess as Janette Frevola cried. Her son walked over to the witness stand to comfort her before she regained her composure and testimony continued.

Janette said that, before working for Basabe, her son was a “very vibrant young man” who “loved everyone” and “got along with everyone.”

Now, she said, “he’s always upset and disappointed at life.”

Lasting impact

On Monday, the first day of the trial in which Basabe is representing himself without an attorney, the proceedings were shaded by Basabe’s blundering legal missteps and procedural chaos.

Marsh told the parties before the jury entered Tuesday that he decided not to sanction Basabe for his actions Monday — including referencing topics before the jury that the judge had told him not to — but he left the door open for a wide scope of punishments if Basabe didn’t follow his orders, including potentially requiring Basabe to pay for fees and costs of the trial if “you are the cause” of a mistrial.

Tuesday’s proceedings featured some similar tensions over Basabe’s legal acumen but also homed in on the question of what effect the Miami Beach representative’s alleged harassment had on Nicolas and Janette Frevola and former Basabe intern Jacob Cutbirth, who has accused Basabe of trying to kiss him and making unwelcome sexual comments.

Basabe suggested that the plaintiffs had faced limited repercussions and spoke about the toll that their allegations took on his own well-being, referring to “two massive investigations that took up three years of my life.” A second investigation commissioned by the Florida House was unable to corroborate harassment claims by Frevola and Cutbirth.

“There’s grave concern that people can just walk around saying anything about anyone and try to get away with it,” Basabe said.

Frevola and Cutbirth have filed a separate lawsuit against the Florida House over its handling of the investigations, alleging that the investigative reports left out key details.

The two testified that the alleged harassment and impact from Basabe’s social media post decrying the “false accusation” have continued to impact their lives.

Cutbirth described having “a lot of anxiety” around any news stories about the allegations and how he and his wife decided to retain separate last names, partly because of the way his name had been tied to sexual harassment claims.

“It would be actually very disheartening to hear that an employer would not want to hire me or my wife because of any type of adjacency to it, but also understand the reality that there is a lawsuit, that we’re here now,” Cutbirth said Tuesday morning.

Frevola detailed Monday how friends and colleagues in Tallahassee stopped answering his phone calls after he reported Basabe’s alleged conduct and Basabe maligned him on social media.

“They made me out to be the enemy,” he told the court Monday.

After receiving a degree in political science and working in the state Capitol for five years, Frevola said finding a job in politics in the years since serving in Basabe’s office and reporting the harassment claims has “been the hardest struggle of my life.”

Old allegation enters the courtroom

A 2003 sexual assault allegation against Basabe also hung over the second day of trial — but the jury won’t hear a thing about it.

A man using the pseudonym T.S. in court records flew to Tallahassee as “a witness who chooses to be here on their own time, their own dime” to bolster the former staffers’ case, according to the plaintiffs’ attorney Katherine Viker.

His account was first reported by the Miami Herald in October 2024, in which he accused Basabe of drugging and raping him in Los Angeles 21 years earlier. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office told the Herald earlier this month that it declined to file charges after the man reported his allegations to the police in 2024 because it was outside the statute of limitations.

Basabe seemed unaware of the man’s presence in the courthouse, after Marsh had ruled before trial that the man would not be permitted as a witness.

But the plaintiffs filed a midday request Tuesday to get the judge to reconsider that decision, arguing that Basabe had called his former staffers’ honesty into question during the trial and that the third man’s 2003 account was relevant to proving their credibility.

The judge allowed T.S. to take the witness stand without the jury in the room. He described, in great detail, the same allegations he previously recounted to the Herald: After getting in a hot tub with Basabe at an afterparty, he said, Basabe gave him a drink that seemingly caused him to fall over and become violently ill. Shortly after that, the man said, Basabe sexually assaulted him on a couch as he went in and out of consciousness.

Basabe denied the allegations when they were first made public in the Herald in 2024, and an attorney for him said in a statement at the time that he “has never sexually battered anyone and never would.”

After hearing the man’s brief testimony — which included T.S. telling Basabe that his experience “shows that you have a pattern” — Marsh ruled that his testimony could confuse the jury in the current case and again ruled against letting him testify.

The jury is set to decide on whether Basabe should be held liable for the alleged harassment and defamation — and what, if anything, he should pay them in damages — by Thursday.

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