Days before Republicans vote in the March 17 gubernatorial primary, a former Kane County Young Republicans official has revisited an incident she says left her hospitalized after Darren Bailey’s 2025 campaign kickoff event last September.
During a March 10 appearance on the 815 Has Problems podcast, Cecilia Brooks, the former secretary for the Kane County Young Republicans detailed the incident, raising renewed questions about the conduct of campaign affiliates and how the situation was handled.
Brooks said it all started at the Sept. 25, 2025 kickoff party at The Drake Hotel, where Bailey, a former state senator who challenged and lost to Gov. JB Pritzker in 2022, launched his campaign alongside lieutenant governor running mate Aaron Del Mar.
After attending the public event, Brooks said she joined a smaller group for a private dinner and later an outing to the Esco Bar nightclub.
“The only rule for tonight is no flash photography and no cell phones,” Brooks recounted Bailey campaign manager Jose Durbin saying during the car ride.
Brooks spent the night out with campaign operatives, including Durbin and Brett Corrigan. She said she was groped by the campaign operatives and subjected to requests for lap dances.
Brooks said she felt fine until the group began returning to the Drake Hotel in a Sprinter van, when she suddenly experienced dizziness, tunnel vision and rapid physical decline before losing consciousness and collapsing.
“I remember everything up until a certain point,” Brooks said during the interview. “When we get back onto the Sprinter to leave Escobar, to go back to the Drake from the city, I was fine. So coming down the stairs, leaving the club, I was fine, getting onto the sprinter, I was fine even in the beginning of the ride.”
She described a rapid and unusual decline shortly afterward.
“It’s only a portion of way through the ride that I’m starting to not feel so good,” Brooks said. “And it wasn’t an upset stomach or anything. It was—I’m slowly going downhill and because originally it started as me kind of getting dizzy and lightheaded, but that didn’t make any sense to me considering I had been fine coming down the stairs and getting in.”
Brooks said the symptoms intensified quickly, noting her “decline is pretty rapid” and included a growing fear that she would lose consciousness before returning to the hotel.
“That’s why I’m realizing I think I’m going to lose consciousness,” she said. “And so I’m getting tunnel vision on either side. My peripheral vision is going out, like, out.”
She said the last moment she remembers occurred when the vehicle arrived at the hotel.
“That is the last thing I remember is trying to step off of the Sprinter,” she said.
Brooks said she later learned there was roughly half an hour during which she has no memory of events.
“It’s about 30-ish minutes that’s unaccounted for,” she said. “Now, I don’t know what happened at that time. I am completely just gone at that point, which is terrifying.”
According to police reports, Brooks was removed from the Sprinter van and hotel staff at the Drake Hotel intervened, refusing an alleged request from Durbin to book an extra room for her, citing liability concerns. Hotel staff eventually called emergency responders and Brooks was transported to the hospital.
Brooks said a photo later spread on social media depicting Durbin looking through her purse while she was incapacitated.
“It’s extremely suspicious because, keep in mind, as just a young woman, as a girl’s girl, and somebody with many friends, even my girlfriends, my best friends, don’t just go into my purse,” Brooks said. “It’s like that. That’s just not something that you do.”
The incident later drew attention after police body-camera footage, Corrigan said he did not know Brooks and describing her as simply an attendee who had been drinking at the event.
“So we hosted an event here tonight. I don’t know who this girl was. She’s an attendee of the event. There’s a bar. She was drinking. I didn’t know what happened with her,” Corrigan said.
Brooks countered Corrigan’s assertion saying she was personally invited to the event and dinner afterward.
“We saw her, and she was responding to it, so I got very concerned,” Corrigan told police. “Obviously, we were all drinking, that’s what you do when you’re staying in a hotel. I asked them to call an ambulance because she was not responding. We checked her pulse.”
Corrigan also emphasized the political nature of the gathering.
“It was a political event,” he said. “We want to keep everything under wraps because it’s a political situation.”
Shortly after the incident, Corrigan joined Rick Heidner’s rival GOP primary campaign.
Brett Corrigan talks with police on bodycam after the 2025 Darren Bailey campaign event where
Cecilia Brooks was hospitalized. (Facebook / Danny Souri)
Notably, Corrigan had previously threatened to sue Bailey following his unsuccessful 2022 campaign, even having attorney Scott Kaspar, co-owner of The Illinois Review, draft a lawsuit that was never filed.
In the days following her hospitalization, Brooks said Durbin and Corrigan contacted her and offered to cover medical costs.
“The immediate first thing was, ‘Oh my gosh. We’re so sorry, we’re so sorry,’” Brooks said.
She said Durbin and Corrigan offer financial support from the campaign for her medical care.
“Then they proceed to say, ‘It’s okay, send us your hospital bills, send us your hospital bill, we’ll take care of it, we’ll take care out of campaign funds, don’t worry,’” Brooks said.
Brooks questioned how campaign affiliates handled the situation and what occurred during the period she cannot recall.
While Brooks did not reveal the results of her toxicology reports, she said medical testing did not indicate typical alcohol intoxication.
“You’ve got your normal range and then you’ve gotten your out-of-range,” she said. “There is no—it’s clear as day. It’s either green or it’s not right, and it’s completely in the separate direction. And so literally, just seeing that, it shows you out of range.”
Drawing on her experience as a bartender, Brooks said she can identify the normal stages of alcohol intoxication, and she emphasized that what she experienced was clearly not typical drunkenness.
“You immediately know something’s not right,” she said.
Brooks described the incident as “absolutely terrifying” and called it traumatic.
She said she wants to raise awareness about recognizing unusual signs of physical distress and also addressed the personal impact of the incident and her decision to speak publicly about it.
“This started off as justice for me, but I’m realizing at this point this is much bigger than myself,” Brooks said. “This is a track record of horrible people and behavior within the party. These are people that need to go, these are people who need to be held accountable, and these are people that clearly behaved the way they did because, for whatever reason, they haven’t faced repercussions.”
In the days after the incident, Brooks said GOP operatives were calling others in party circles and sharing an account favorable to the Bailey campaign.
“There are some individuals who need not be named, but they are going around spreading that there were narcotics and other substances in my system,” she said. “That is also a lie.”
Brooks said she had no time to process the situation and felt violated watching her trauma circulate.
“I’m literally watching everybody tell my story and gossip and just spread all of this in front of me while I am not even having the moment to process what happened,” she said.
The controversy was on full display in January during a heated confrontation at a “Pints and Politics” event in Aurora.
At the Jan. 7 event hosted by the Three Headed Eagle Alliance at Aurora Country Club, Brooks confronted Bailey about the September incident and accused campaign affiliates of trying to silence her.
At the January event, Bailey denied responsibility for the September incident involving Brooks when asked about it by 815 Has Problems host and Aurora Township GOP Chairman Danny Souri.
“I don’t know, nor was my name or anyone on my team associated with what you’re talking about,” Bailey told Souri at the event. “Brett Corrigan put on the event for us, and everything that happened was under his watch, not my campaign.”
As the questions and answer period of the event adjourned Brook bolted up in the crowd and began shouting.
“They are trying to silence a victim!” Brooks told the crowd. “I ended up in the emergency room during their campaign kickoff.”
As Bailey supporters attempted to remove her from the event, Brooks protested.
“Take your hands off of me. Don’t touch me,” she said.
She added that she was willing to publicly explain the incident.
“If you ask me questions I will gladly release my statement, I will tell you everything,” Brooks said.
However, in the aftermath of that event Brooks did not respond to a phone call and text from the Kane County Reporter seeking an interview regarding her story. She withheld comment on the matter until the 815 Has Problems interview with Souri a week prior to the election.
Truth Watch Illinois, affiliated with the gubernatorial campaign of DuPage County Sheriff Jim Mendrick, described the confrontation as hostile, alleging that Souri and Brooks were “attacked” and that campaign and Three Headed Eagle Alliance staff were “pushing and shoving the victim out,” while attendees “applause and cheer while the victim is being pushed, shoved, and escorted out.”
The group noted, “This behavior is unacceptable.”
Brooks noted she intends to continue speaking out.
“I told Darren Bailey at the Three-Head Eagle Alliance meeting when he treated me the way he did, which was completely unprovoked, by the way, I looked at him as they were pushing me out and I pointed and said, ‘Darren Bailey, you will not silence me and your team will not silence me,’ and when I said that, I meant it,” she said. “And I’m still here and I am still speaking because they will not silence me.”
Amid the backlash and ongoing scrutiny, Brooks emphasized her commitment to continue to seek accountability for those involved.
“I’m holding these people accountable so that nothing like this ever happens to another woman, especially in our party,” she said. “I hope everybody is paying attention and seeing the way they are treating me, from being physically assaulted to just having a…pathetic attempt at a character assassination against me.”
