Women say Thurston Commission candidate C Davis was inappropriate with them as teens
C Davis, the Republican candidate for Thurston County Commissioner in District 1, is facing allegations that he behaved inappropriately with teenage girls at church functions.
Accounts shared on social media by multiple women, as well as interviews with The Olympian, identify a pattern of unwelcome attention that made the teens feel uncomfortable and anxious.
Davis has denied the claims publicly on Facebook, writing that he doesn’t know the accusers. He told The Olympian he’s working with a lawyer and exploring a defamation lawsuit. On Facebook, C Davis’s name is “CDavis Plover,” but he appeared on primary ballots and registered to vote as simply “C Davis” and has told The Olympian that’s his legal name.
Two women who posted publicly about their experiences, Marya Wargacki and Crystal McDonald, shared their stories with The Olympian. Both describe Davis’s behavior as escalating quickly at separate Catholic churches in the area and ending with him leaving the churches.
Wargacki said a friend’s Facebook post included Davis’s photo from the voters pamphlet, and she instantly recognized his face and unique name — she said she’s never met anyone else whose name is just one letter. When she knew Davis in 2004 or 2005, however, she said he had short, dark hair.
McDonald said she also recognized Davis immediately in her voters pamphlet, and that she’s seen him around the community since her experience with him 20 years ago. She said he had the long, swept-back hair he has today.
The women and their family members said Davis’s actions impacted their daily lives — they started asking to stay home from church to avoid him — and his behavior led parish leadership to confront him, resulting in his departure.
They said they were inspired to speak out after seeing other women share similar stories, prompted by his political run.
Both women said they don’t personally know any other candidates in the race and are speaking out on their own, not at the behest of any campaign or political party. Wargacki said Davis’s general election opponent, Carolina Mejia, friended her on Facebook the day she shared her story and thanked her for sharing, but that she doesn’t know her personally. And she isn’t a Thurston County voter.
Wargacki’s allegations have garnered more than 200 comments and more than 700 shares on Facebook, including a share from McDonald that included her own story and had drawn over 50 comments and seven shares as of Thursday morning.
The accusations have cast a shadow over a race that was already roiling.
A socialist and former candidate for local office filed a challenge last week alleging Davis doesn’t live where he’s registered to vote. Meanwhile, Democrat Mejia, who handily won the seat’s primary race, is facing a legal challenge saying she is not a U.S. citizen, even though she has provided naturalization papers and a passport to the Thurston County Auditor’s Office.
Davis presents himself as a somewhat eccentric figure and his campaign often uses inflammatory, extreme rhetoric on Twitter.
In July, the campaign retweeted a live video that apparently showed what Seattle police had deemed a riot, saying “the time is over for non-lethal response” and encouraging “lethal defense of the Seattle community” and an end to “the Marxist insurrection.”
His website states that he wants to help “return Thurston County to the way it used to be,” and his platform, via Facebook, consists of “no new courthouse,” streamlining building permits, protecting property rights, and preserving the environment by “eliminating homeless camps.”
“I have been put in good company with Clarence Thomas, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and President Donald Trump. Someone has been making false allegations against me and my good character,” Davis wrote on Facebook. “All of these allegations are false.”
‘Something isn’t right’
Marya Wargacki said she was 12 when Davis started attending Saint George Byzantine Catholic Church, near Lacey, where she and her family had belonged for years. Davis attended the church for about six months, she estimated.
Her father, Joseph Wargacki, was a deacon, essentially an assistant to the priest. He’s since become a priest himself — Byzantine priests can marry and have children — and was transferred in 2016 to a church in Anchorage, Alaska.
Marya Wargacki said she saw her dad greet C Davis along with other parishioners entering the church’s hall for social hour. She said she didn’t second-guess it when Davis began to make conversation with her, and she felt a child’s obligation to be polite and engage.
But it quickly made her uncomfortable, she said, when he didn’t just ask a question or two before moving on, as she had come to expect from adults. Instead, she said, he started asking questions that she felt were inappropriately personal.
Wargacki said in that first conversation he asked her whether she had a boyfriend, if she wanted to get married, if she wanted children, and about a good place to find a wife — she said it felt like she was being interviewed. She was 12 years old at the time, she said.
This was roughly 2004 or 2005, she and her family said. According to the birth date on Davis’s voter registration, he would’ve been about 45 years old.
“I scanned the room frantically, hoping my little sister would pull me away, or that it would be time to leave,” Wargacki wrote in her Facebook post. “I knew I should be polite to this newcomer, but his odd behavior disturbed me.”
She said he would talk to her often after church service from that point on. She’d catch him staring at her during service, she said, and watching and following her as she played in the field behind the social hall. And she remembers a particular instance when she was alone in the field, looking for an earring, when he again approached and started asking questions.
Wargacki became hypervigilant of Davis’s whereabouts and had a “secret signal” she shared with other girls her age to avoid him, she wrote on Facebook.
It felt predatory, she told The Olympian, because it seemed as if he were targeting her even while she was actively trying to avoid him.
In a phone interview with The Olympian, her father said he remembers a parishioner approaching him to say Davis was acting strangely around his daughter — perhaps spending more time with her than was appropriate. Her mother, Lori Wargacki, remembers a parishioner approaching her, too, with similar concerns.
Marya’s parents kept an eye on the situation and brought it up with Marya when they didn’t see the behavior changing.
“I remember her crying, and she was really upset,” Lori Wargacki said. She remembers discussing with Marya whether Davis knew where she lived, and Marya responding that she told him when and where she had basketball practice.
For Marya, the conversation with her parents gave credence to internal concerns.
“My parents’ disclosure that they were uncomfortable with how C Davis was acting with me validated the little voice in my mind that said, ‘Something isn’t right,’” Wargacki wrote on Facebook. “It was then that I began to panic.”
She said she started asking to skip church, and crying when she thought about having to be around him.
Marya’s sister Emmelia Wargacki was 9 at the time. She said it’s hard for her to distinguish her own memories from the family’s many conversations about the situation over the years. But she has a distinct memory of her sister grabbing her arm in panic while Davis was in the room, and she remembers her sister missing church for a few weeks.
She didn’t have a full understanding of what was happening, she said, but could tell people were worried, and it felt significant.
Eventually, Joseph Wargacki said he and the church’s priest at the time, The Rev. Lee Perry, confronted Davis and told him his behavior was making people uncomfortable, and that he needed to leave Marya alone. If he couldn’t leave Marya alone, Wargacki said, they told Davis he needed to leave.
The Olympian reached Perry, who’s now a priest at Holy Trinity Byzantine Church in New Britain, Connecticut, this week. He remembers the situation, though he remembers Davis’s departure from the church a little differently.
He said he remembers Davis suddenly coming to the tight-knit parish, and that the church was happy to have him. Davis was very social, he said.
But parents started noticing he was “zeroing in on the children, especially the girls,” Perry said. Davis was reported to be staring at them and asking inappropriate questions, such as how they felt about getting married early, where they went to school, and what time they got out of school and soccer practice, he said. He remembered him targeting Marya Wargacki, in particular.
“The flags were coming up, one after the other, concerning him,” Perry said.
Parents expressed concern to Perry, he said. In his recollection, a parent confronted Davis directly and said they were uncomfortable with Davis being there. When Davis asked why, that parent said he should talk to the priest. When Davis approached him, Perry said he told Davis people were uncomfortable with his actions.
In Perry’s telling, Davis said that if they’re uncomfortable, he wouldn’t go there anymore and left voluntarily. He didn’t ask him to leave, he said, but it probably would’ve gotten to that point.
Perry said he believes Davis is “a danger,” though he “never crossed the line, as far as legally.”
“He should not be serving in public office,” Perry said. “No way. It’s unfortunate he got this far.”
In Marya’s account, she later received a MySpace message from a “C Knightly,” who had a sparse profile without a photo.
“The message indicated ... that he didn’t know why he was asked to leave the church and asked not to contact me, and that he was so confused,” Marya wrote. “He said I could show the message to my parents to prove that he had good intentions.”
The message made her feel “nauseous,” she wrote. Her parents said they didn’t know anything about the MySpace message — Marya never told them because she was forbidden from having a MySpace account, Lori Wargacki said, and would check it at a friend’s house.
“She has always been a really strong person,” Lori Wargacki said of her daughter, adding that Marya’s a cancer survivor. “When she was that age, in basketball, they called her The Pitbull.”
Marya Wargacki said it had been “really easy to trivialize” the situation in her head, but that her sharing her story and the reaction it’s getting has delivered a sense of closure and taught her to trust the voice in her head.
‘He did not really know how to take no for an answer’
Seeing Wargacki speak out gave Crystal McDonald courage to do the same, she said, about her experience with Davis in 2000. She met Davis at St. Michael Parish in Olympia.
“Oh my gosh, I just felt sick to my stomach,” McDonald told The Olympian about when she read Wargacki’s post. “It meant I wasn’t an isolated incident.”
She describes similarly targeted behaviors, when she had just turned 18 and her family had moved to Olympia from California and started attending St. Michael.
McDonald said she encountered Davis over the course of about a month in 2000, when Davis would have been roughly 40 years old.
She joined the choir, led by Lee Ann Scherman, immediately after her family joined the parish, she said. She said Davis started approaching her about three or four weeks after she started cantoring, which is assisting and encouraging the congregation in sung prayer.
On Sundays for the next month, Davis would come with flowers after church. He wanted to take McDonald on a date, and she repeatedly told him no, she said.
“He did not really know how to take no for an answer from me,” McDonald told The Olympian.
McDonald’s sister, Shari Risk, remembers it progressing from strange stares across the church, to Davis making his way to the pews closer to where McDonald was singing, to trying to talk to her after service.
“Then it got worse, where he’d continually try to corner her in the back of the church,” Risk said.
Risk said she was 8 years old at the time, and remembers her sister coming back from an interaction with him visibly shaken and uncomfortable. She remembers Davis bringing flowers and chocolates — once, a CD filled with love songs — and her sister throwing them away. And she remembers feeling afraid because she could tell by the tones of adults’ voices that this was a scary situation.
She saw her sister begin to make sure she was never alone at the church.
“I remember her not wanting to come to church a lot when this was going on, because he just made her feel afraid,” she said. McDonald’s dad kept an eye on Davis, Risk said.
Scherman, who was the music director at the church for decades, wrote in a prepared statement to The Olympian that Davis was “really pushy” with McDonald. Once, Scherman said, she had her arm around McDonald to take her out to her car because she was scared.
“He got in front of us and tried to hand her a cassette tape,” Scherman wrote. “I told her she did not want it and to leave her alone. He persisted and I said ‘leave her alone!’ again. Then I walked Crystal out to her car and waited while she left to make sure he wasn’t following her.”
She said she briefly talked with St. Michael’s priest, The Rev. Jim Lee, about the situation, later saw him talking with Davis, and heard the priest tell Davis to leave McDonald alone.
Reached by phone this week, Lee said he didn’t remember a lot about what happened 20 years ago, but that he recognized Davis when he saw an advertisement in The Olympian and couldn’t place him beyond knowing he was at St. Michael a long time ago.
He said he remembers asking Davis not to interact with McDonald and Scherman or that he would be asked to leave.
Why come forward now?
Marya Wargacki says she now lives in Tacoma and works per diem as a lab assistant at Capital Medical Center, nannies for her niece and nephew, and is raising a 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.
Davis’s election wouldn’t directly affect her as a constituent. But she said the shock of seeing him running prompted a “strong emotional urge” to speak up — especially as a mom.
“I just want people to be aware of this pattern that I think is being established by the accounts of me and other women,” Wargacki said in a phone call with The Olympian. “That’s what I kind of hope will come out of your article. That people can decide for themselves if this is important enough to weigh in on their decision to who they’re going to vote for.”
When asked about her motivations, Crystal McDonald said she’s voted Democrat and Republican in the past, and considers herself an independent.
But she’s actively not supporting President Donald Trump for “the exact reasons” she “wouldn’t support C Davis.”
“I don’t want other women to be in vulnerable situations where a man in a position of power can try to do things he shouldn’t do,” said McDonald, who’s raising a 16-year-old son and 11- and 13-year-old daughters. “I’m trying to set an example for my girls about speaking out when something’s not right.”
This story was originally published August 28, 2020 at 5:45 AM.
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