A Republican Power Broker Spent 45 Years in Office and 14 Trips to Prague Exploiting Children. The System Let Him.

Ray Holmberg didn’t just hold a seat in the North Dakota Senate. He owned it. Forty-five and a half years, the longest-serving state legislator in the country, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, chairman of Legislative Management. The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead called him “one of the most powerful and popular lawmakers in the legislature.” The Grand Forks Herald named him Person of the Year in 2021. He was supposed to be one of North Dakota’s three electors certifying the 2020 presidential election.

And for at least a decade of that reign, he was flying to Prague to pay for sex with boys as young as 12.

The Department of Justice laid it out in cold, prosecutorial prose. Fourteen trips between 2011 and 2021. A brothel that catered to men looking for commercial sex with adolescent boys. He used the alias “Sean Evans” so his real name, a sitting state senator’s name, wouldn’t appear on the brothel’s registry. He emailed a friend a link to that brothel and wrote: “The boys rent at around $60 . . . (sex is extra).” He shared a photo of an adolescent boy he called “his twink.” He wrote: “no one is ever to [sic] young . . . remember Prague.” He wrote: “What happens in Prague. Stays in Prague.”

He boasted, back home in the United States, about having sex with boys who were 12 and 15 years old. He posed as a teenage boy online to manipulate a 16-year-old Canadian child into sending him sexually explicit images. He was texting with an incarcerated man charged with possessing over 6,500 images and videos of child sexual abuse material, discussing his interest in meeting that man’s young boyfriend “to give him a massage.”

This is not a story about one bad man. Ray Holmberg is a story about every institution that touched him and looked away.

Ronald Peterson and Duane Evenson, editors (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

He was a school counselor. He worked for Grand Forks Public Schools from 1967 to 2002, around children, in a position of trust. He spent more state money on travel than any other North Dakota legislator from 2013 through mid-2022, $125,810 of public funds, and nobody asked where he was going 14 times. He chaired the committee that wrote the state’s budgets. He sat on the redistricting committee and blocked a Native American-majority district, a map later ruled a violation of the Voting Rights Act by a federal judge. He resigned in 2022 only after a newspaper uncovered his communications with the jailed child pornography suspect, and even then, he cited “health issues including weakened cognitive abilities” as his reason for leaving.

And after he resigned? He was still around. Still meeting with legislators. Still offering advice. Still soliciting support for Republican candidates. Still trading on his “institutional knowledge” as though he hadn’t spent a decade using his power and mobility as a weapon against children.

Ten years. That is the sentence. Ten years for 14 trips, for boys as young as 12, for a lifetime of access and authority weaponized against the most vulnerable people he could find. He will be eligible for release in May 2033, when he is 88. His lifetime teaching license was suspended, not revoked, until he pleaded guilty. The system moved at the speed of a system that protects its own.

Every person who celebrated Holmberg, who gave him awards, who let him chair the money committee while he spent public funds flying to a brothel, owes this community an accounting. Every colleague who kept meeting with him after his resignation, who treated him as an elder statesman, who let “institutional knowledge” outweigh the safety of children, made a choice. Structural impunity does not require a conspiracy. It only requires people in power deciding that one of their own is more valuable than the children he harmed.

We need independent oversight of legislative travel and spending. We need mandatory reporting structures that do not depend on a newspaper uncovering text messages by accident. We need to stop treating longevity as virtue and start treating unchecked power as what it is: a danger. Ray Holmberg had 45 years and 14 trips and $125,810 and a brothel registry with a fake name on it. The children he harmed had none of those things. That imbalance is the story. That is what must be dismantled.