A breaking political “sex scandal” on Gawker.com is an article written by an anonymous (or barely-so) man who claims to have had what he calls a “one-night stand” with Christine O’Donnell is not one that I would credit. The fact that the scandal is being released right now, the weekend before the election, makes it almost indisputable that it is politically-motivated, to no end that I can ascertain given that O’Donnell is polling so badly and her campaign appears to be destined to go down in flames. Also note that the man in question was apparently paid cash money for his story — something in the “four figures.” Ooh. Aah.
Because my analysis crosses the line into the vulgar at one point, the rest of my take on the story comes after the jump. Suffice to say, if you want to skip my analysis, the story has two major holes that I found with only one read-through and minimal investigation, I don’t believe it and neither should you. If you live in Delaware nothing in this story should affect the way you plan to vote for Senate — if you liked O’Donnell before, you should still vote for her; if you liked Coons before, you should still vote for him. After the jump, then, the details about why I don’t believe this crap for a second.
Here’s the background. The “accuser” guy says he had had briefly met O’Donnell some time before Halloween of 2007, when she and a girlfriend came by on Halloween and asked to change costumes in his apartment. The women persuaded the men to go bar-hopping with them despite it being a work night. The author says that he wasn’t aware at the start of the night that O’Donnell was 14 years older than him but he said he found her attractive. After sharing many drinks, and flirting back and forth, the anonymous man and O’Donnell separated from the other two, with some sort of clearance between the two women. They went back to the anonymous author’s place, where they made out, got in bed together, and began to remove one anothers’ clothing.
So far, that rings more or less true; an alcohol-fueled hookup after a night of partying is an experience that a lot of us have had. But this passage in the Gawker story* is where I figuratively threw my pen onto the table in disbelief, after the point the two are in bed together and nuding up:
…there were signs that she wasn’t very experienced sexually. When her underwear came off, I immediately noticed that the waxing trend had completely passed her by. Obviously, that was a big turnoff, and I quickly lost interest. I said goodnight, rolled over, and went to sleep.
Bullshit you did, dude.
What drunk, horny 25 year old heterosexual male is going to decline sexplay with a willing, naked, and attractive woman with whom he’d been partying for eight hours and been making out and fooling around with for at least an hour? Because she hadn’t trimmed her public hair? You really expect me to buy that this guy (whose attractiveness is, let’s be charitable, “average” in the photos on The Smoking Gun) was getting so much pussy that he felt comfortable saying, “No way am I fooling around with an untrimmed vagina, so let’s just go to sleep instead.”? I’m supposed to believe that?
I’m not saying (single) men never decline an opportunity for sex when it’s available. I’m saying that under these circumstances, this is what we lawyers call “testimony lacking in credibility,” or to put it more succinctly, “fiction.”
The top comment at TSG points out something that I might have missed, too. The photos of a visibly intoxicated O’Donnell are next to a beer advertisement poster commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Philadelphia Eagles franchise. Since the Eagles were founded in 1933, that means that the photograph was taken in 2008.
But the text is clear that the encounter took place on Halloween, not before (“I barely knew Christine when she turned up at my door at around eight o’clock on the night of Halloween“) and it refers to the evening out as beginning in the evening hours of a Wednesday and concluding with the anonymous man incredibly refusing an offer of sex at 4:00 the following Thursday morning (“It was a Wednesday evening, and my roommate and I hadn’t been planning to go out. We both had to get up pretty early the next morning for work.“)
Halloween fell on a Friday in 2008. Something isn’t adding up here. Picture, consistent with man in Boy Scout uniform and O’Donnell in ladybug costume, was clearly taken in 2008, but story refers to events in 2007. Ergo, the story at minimum contains elements that are simply not true. And there is no reason for those elements of the story to have been faked.
Of course, this may be investing too much trouble in to the story. Why should anyone care if a few years ago, Christine O’Donnell went out partying, picked up a younger guy, fooled around a bit but didn’t go all the way, and then went on with her life the next day? Criticizing her for doing that would make me a hypocrite, and quite a large number of other people hypocrites too. It’s a free country. Neither of them were married, nothing was coerced, and nothing ever came of it. Men go out cruising for younger women all the time, so what’s so awful about a woman cruising for a younger man?
O’Donnell’s campaign responded with a post on Facebook that seems odd to me. Not that there is no denial of the claim that O’Donnell had hooked up with a younger guy — I agree with that; she has nothing to apologize for and no need to explain a minor episode from her personal life nor any obligation to dignify an “accusation” like that with a denial. Instead, the response seems to say that O’Donnell is the victim of an orchestrated attack grounded in sexism and masterminded by the Coons campaign. It seems to backhandedly condemn the National Organization of Women at the same time it cites NOW condemning the story. It’s hard for me to say that the smear comes from the Coons campaign; as I noted above, there hardly seems to be any reason for Coons to do something like this since he was so certain to win without it. Such a stunt could only backfire on him.
* I had misgivings about linking directly to the Gawker site, but decided to do so in order to link to its photograph — the photograph and the text which turn out to have an irreconcilable inconsistently, demonstrating that the anonymous author claiming to have had this encounter is not being truthful about when it took place. There really is no substitute for that; thus, the link. So remember the jury instruction, folks: one who is deliberately untruthful in one aspect of his testimony is to be distrusted in other aspects of his story. And I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that I consider the story to be untrue.
