Liz Hart studied city planning with an eye on helping her hometown, and a foot in the door working for the former Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero. But his persistent sexual harassment led her to abandon that dream.

Virg Bernero is a charismatic leader who built a national brand as “America’s Angriest Mayor” by going to bat for the city of Lansing. He has connections all over the city, and some statewide pull, too; he was the Democratic candidate for governor in 2010.

He had mounted another mayoral run, which he abruptly ended on Sunday after women including Hart told MLive he had sexually harassed them.

Hart started working for Bernero as an intern in his mayoral office in 2013. She agreed to join his campaign leading fundraising efforts later that year, and it was then – mostly in conversations at the campaign office – that she started feeling uncomfortable around him.

“When you work with people you get to know them. And that’s kind of what it was at first. And then he would slip in like sexual comments, like things that he liked. Or he would ask me questions of things that I would like. I would never answer, I never felt comfortable with it. But that was how it started,” Hart said.

But that’s not how it ended. His conversations with her grew more explicit. She started ignoring phone calls from him late at night, and fending off sexual conversations, advances and requests.

At a lunch with other campaign workers and mayoral staff one day, Hart was wearing sandals and had one foot crossed over her leg when Bernero picked the spot next to her.

“He sat down, put his stuff down, and somehow he decided to just take his finger and run it along my foot. I just… I moved legs, I switched them, and didn’t say anything,” she said.

Later, she said, he told her he had a foot fetish.

Emily Heverly, a friend of Hart’s, volunteered on the Bernero campaign. She remembers Hart describing uncomfortable incidents with Bernero, including having touched her foot, and an uncomfortable situation in his mayoral office.

Hart said at one point, Bernero called her into his mayoral office, but hid her from other staff members. He asked her to drink vodka he kept in his desk.

“He was like really, really persistent about it, and finally I just said ‘sure,’ so I took a sip and that was it,” Hart said.

He was ranting about the city council and getting physically close to her, she said. Then, “he asked me to show him one of my breasts and I was just like ‘absolutely not.’” She texted Heverly to call her and used the call as an excuse to leave.

Hearing about the sexual harassment Hart was experiencing at the time, “I remember feeling so powerless to not be able to help her. Because I can’t tell my friend to like quit her job. She’s a few months out of undergrad,” Heverly said.

And Bernero’s sexual harassment ended up impacting Heverly, too.