The mayor of one of North Dakota’s largest cities resigned after sending a video of himself to a female city official in which he was masturbating.
Tom Ross, 60, who is nonpartisan, stepped down as mayor of Minot—which with a population around 50,000 is the state’s fourth-largest city—after the Tuesday conclusion of an investigation into the incident.
“I have had a professional and respectful relationship with every City of Minot Staff member that I have come across. I am proud of that,” Ross wrote in a resignation letter to the city council shortly before they publicly shared a report on the investigation. “Unfortunately, I have let them down as a leader, as I have with many in our community.”
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The report says that Ross, who said he sent the video by accident, called Stefanie Stalheim, 40, soon after sending it and asked her to delete it without viewing. He explained that it was intended as “a sexy video for his girlfriend.”
Before he sent the video, Ross and Stalheim had just spoken by phone about a police officer under investigation who had died by suicide. When she received the video of Ross masturbating, she was joined in her office by two of the city’s HR workers, who were consoling her.
When Ross described to Stalheim the content of the video he was asking her to delete, which she hadn’t yet seen, she “physically collapsed and fell out of her chair” due to the “combined stress” of receiving a lewd video shortly after learning of the officer’s death.
When Stalheim went to delete the video, she caught a glimpse of Ross’s erect penis, and decided that she was too distraught to handle deleting it. One of the HR employees present, Monica Porterfield, agreed to delete it on her behalf, but in the process accidentally hit play. She said later that it showed a man masturbating.
Ross told an interviewer for the city that he recorded the video on his lunch break, shortly after speaking with Stalheim about the officer’s death, and immediately sent it. It was intended to “express excitement” about an upcoming date with his girlfriend. The mishap occurred because because both “City Attorney,” as Stalheim was saved in his phone, and his partner’s name began with a “C,” Ross said.
The report says that Stalheim struggled with the decision to bring a formal complaint against Ross, who was her direct supervisor. After conferring with HR, she decided to proceed with a complaint.
While Ross maintained after the incident that he “respected [Stalheim] as a valued colleague,” she told a city interviewer that she was “extremely uncomfortable interacting” with him after what happened.
The investigator concluded that Ross had “caused Stalheim’s inability to work in an environment free from unreasonable sexual harassment and created an offensive work environment.”
In his resignation letter, Ross wrote, “My focus now will be on my physical and mental health. I have tried to be too much to too many people. I have failed.”
“The standard I have set for myself is too high to maintain,” he said.
Ross was elected as mayor in 2022 after serving two years on the city council. A biography on the city’s page says he has “20 years experience in the television broadcasting industry” and that he also serves as the executive director of an assisted living facility. Based on his campaign page on Facebook, Ross appears to have three children.
Stalheim’s LinkedIn page shows that she has been an attorney for the city for almost 10 years. In a May 2023 profile, she told The Dakotan that she had a husband and three children.
