Republican Fabian Basabe lost his bid for a third term as a Florida state representative on Tuesday in the wake of a series of scandals, including a jury that found him liable for sexual harassment, battery and defamation in a civil lawsuit brought by former staffers earlier this year.
Democratic challenger Lucia Báez-Geller, a former Miami Beach Senior High English teacher and Miami-Dade School Board member, will take his place representing District 106, which stretches from South Beach to Aventura.
She has promised to file a bill that would require property insurers seeking rate increases to publicly disclose how they’re spending the money they make from premiums. An unreleased state report showed Florida insurers have reported financial losses while shifting hundreds of millions of dollars to related companies that don’t disclose their profits, according to reporting from the Sun Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel.
Báez-Geller also supported repealing or rewriting the Live Local Act, which wrested local planning and zoning decisions away from cities like Miami Beach. And she vowed to turn the page on Basabe’s scandal-tarred term.
Basabe has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least five men, including the two who won a $450,000 civil judgment against him this year. Basabe once vowed to immediately resign “should any of these allegations ever prove true against me,” but it took the judgment of South Florida voters to finally remove him from office.
Báez-Geller’s victory flips the district back to the Democratic Party after Basabe won the seat in a Republican upset by less than half a percentage point in 2022. Although Miami Beach has traditionally been a blue bastion, Republicans now outnumber Democrats in the district, which Donald Trump won by nine percentage points in 2024.
A screen capture of a YouTube video posted by state Rep. Fabian Basabe in 2024, when he pledged to resign if sexual harassment allegations made against him were found to be true. Basabe, the only Florida state lawmaker running without his party’s endorsement, was unable to capitalize on the Republican registration advantage. In the final days of the campaign, Basabe filmed himself confronting Báez-Geller, her campaign staff, and Miami-Dade Mayor Daniela Levine Cava on the street. Earlier, he submitted an op-ed to the Miami New Times denying sexual assault allegations by writing: “Open your eyes and look at me. I don’t need to rape shit.”
This article first appeared on The Florida Trib and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
