Rindge woman, victim of fraud, seeks Elizabeth Warren’s help at campaign stop in Hollis

Democratic presidential frontrunner Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) spoke to a crowd of about 750 people assembled at the Lawrence Barn in Hollis on Friday. Striding back and forth in front of the big red barn adorned with hay bales, pumpkins and a large American flag, Warren – sporting Ray-Bans to fend off the setting sun – gave her stump speech, detailing her life, background, and plans for big structural change. 

“It’s a hard time for our country, a time of real danger, and we’ve got to make some changes come 2020, and that’s going to happen right here in New Hampshire,” Warren told the crowd.

The senator, who also stopped in Keene Wednesday as part of her 18th trip to New Hampshire this year, didn’t stray far from her usual presentation, railing against corruption and greed and embracing the working class.

“I don’t want a government that works for giant multinational corporations, I want a government that works for families,” Warren said.

At least one person in the crowd perked up at that line – Bonnie Rosengrant of Rindge. Rosengrant owns the Hometown Diner, one of about 4,000 businesses nationwide that used the company MyPayrollHR to pay their employees. But when MyPayrollHR abruptly closed its doors in early September, Rosengrant was left holding the bag, as her payroll deposit wasn’t distributed to her employees and she had to go out of pocket to the tune of $20,ooo to get them their checks. FBI investigators raided the home of MyPayrollHR CEO Michael Mann and charged him with bank fraud, alleging that he diverted $35 million to his own personal account in a series of financial shell games.

State Senator Melanie Levesque of Brookline, who represents Brookline, Greenville, Hollis, Mason, New Ipswich and Rindge, read about Rosengrant’s plight in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript and reached out to her.

“I called her to see what I could do to help,” Levesque said, “and she said to me, ‘I need to talk to Elizabeth Warren.’”

Warren is a former financial lawyer and consumer advocate who helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as an advisor to President Barack Obama.

Rosengrant said she was able to speak with Warren before the campaign event Friday and discuss her plight.

“She’s a go-getter, she’s a bulldog and she is for the consumer,” Rosengrant said. “I thought that she would be more apt to understand what’s happening to us as small business owners and hopefully be able to figure something out for us or work with us to come to some resolution because the regulations are not for the small business owner, they’re for the corporations. This guy took our money and he gets a slap on the wrist, and we’re left to fight on our own to figure this out.”

Warren continues to put up big numbers in New Hampshire in advance of February’s first-in-the-nation primary, drawing big crowds in Franconia, Keene, Peterborough, Hollis and elsewhere, and inducing a thunderous reaction at the state Democratic convention in early September. Last week’s Monmouth poll put her higher than Joe Biden as the Democratic frontrunner in the state, and nationwide Quinnipiac and Economist polls echoed that, all giving her 27 percent, to Biden’s 25.

“This is our moment in American history,” Warren concluded, “our moment to dream big, fight hard and make the changes we need to make.”