According to Peter Clarke, a Navy shipmate, Massa was notorious for making unwanted advances toward subordinates. He tells the story of his friend Stuart Borsch, with whom Massa shared a hotel room while on leave during the first Gulf War. "Stuart's at the edge of the bed," Clarke says Borsch told him at the time, "and starts massaging him. Massa said, 'You'll have to get one of my special massages.' He called them 'Massa Massages.'" Ron Moss, a Navy shipmate and Borsch's roommate, confirmed that Borsch told him this story at the time.
Borsch, now a history professor at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, didn't addresss that specific incident, but did confirm to me in an email that he was groped by Massa: "In 1990, aboard the U.S.S. Jouett, I was awakened when a senior officer, Lt. Commander Massa, seemed to be groping me. (I was a lieutenant at the time.) I believe he may have been drinking. I shouted at him and he left. I mentioned the incident to several other officers. I did not officially report it."
Clarke says that Massa's roommate, Tom Maxfield, was also assaulted. "Tom lived on upper bunk," Clarke say. "When you're on ship, you're almost exhausted 24-7. So a lot of times you sleep with your uniform on. Tom and Massa shared a stateroom together. Massa climbed up on the top of his bunk, which is hard to do--you never crawl up on somebody else's bunk. He wakes up to Massa undoing his pants trying to snorkel him." Ron Moss also confirmed hearing this story from Maxfield. Maxfield did not return calls and messages left for him--I'll update if he does.
Massa's shipmates didn't turn him in for fear that he would retaliate. "He was a cocky guy, competent, but he saw himself as a future admiral," Moss told me. "It doesn't surprise me he wound up in Congress." When news of Dickert's dispute with Massa appeared in the Rochester, New York, Democrat-Chronicle in 2006, several of Massa's former shipmates considered coming forward. One of them referred to the dispute as "classic Massa" in an email that was forwarded to me. As Moss wrote to Borsch and Maxfield just before the 2006 election, when Massa first ran for Congress, "I think it is ironic that Massa is accusing this guy of the same thing he tried with you guys (and who knows how many others?) and I think it is pathetic that he would drag his own son into the fray in a public forum." In the end, the former shipmates did not go public with their stories.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/03/eric-massas-navy-files/37309/
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