Before his political rise, Bay Area congressman Eric Swalwell was portrayed as a campus radical who dabbled in erotic poetry, staged odd pranks, and sympathized with notorious cop killers, the Daily Mail reports. Conservative filmmaker Joel Gilbert unearthed a trove of Swalwell’s decades-old student writings and shared them with the Daily Mail, including a 2001 poem that depicts two lovers engaging in a hotel hookup with graphic violent intensity.
During his age-appropriate college years at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, Swalwell also wrote several screenplays, contributed a risqué piece to The Lyricist, and penned a column for The Campbell Times. An aspiring writer, he explored provocative topics, and one of his poems described a hotel encounter in sensuous terms, with lines about veins “imploded and exploded” during the embrace.
According to the Daily Mail, “Swalwell was 19 when he penned the poem for an ENGL 412 creative writing class. His spokesman laughed off the cringeworthy poetic effort. ‘If you think Eric’s poetry at 18 was bad, you should see his diary entries from when he was 12,’ he said.”
The Daily Mail reports that Swalwell’s early writings also included defenses of controversial figures. In an op-ed from December 1999 titled US Political Prisoners: A Cry for Justice, Swalwell, writing under the moniker “The Radically Poetic,” urged the immediate release of former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal and fellow inmate Leonard Peltier, who was convicted for the 1975 killing of two FBI agents. Peltier later had his life sentence commuted to indefinite house arrest in January 2025 by President Biden, according to the outlet.
In a March 2000 op-ed for The Campbell Times, Swalwell quipped, “I’m not a Republican, nor am I a Democrat— is there really a difference besides an elephant and a donkey?” He admitted he hadn’t voted in presidential elections and claimed, “I belong to my own party; it’s called Lost Cause.”
Swalwell’s past is further scrutinized through an episode involving Christine Fang, the alleged Chinese spy who spent years cultivating relationships with California politicians and reportedly worked on Swalwell’s 2014 re-election campaign before vanishing. The scandal, which surfaced in 2020, cost Swalwell a seat on the House Intelligence Committee; a later standards review did not result in further action.
Gilbert, who has produced films like Trump: The Art of the Insult and The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America, contends that Swalwell’s early eroticized depictions of violence are “disturbing” and raise questions about how his “woke” allies in the #MeToo movement would view those early works.
The political landscape now places Swalwell in the gubernatorial race in California, with a field that features Democrat Katie Porter, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and conservative commentator Steve Hilton. Gilbert framed the candidacy as a test of judgment, saying, “This was a guy who glorified cop killers in college, bragged about rough sex, and thought it was funny to lie to people.” He warned that Swalwell would be a disaster as California’s governor, highlighting the evident and disturbing “warning signs.”