Your guide to all the political sex scandals of the last 24 hours

I hate to admit it on my employer’s website, but this morning I wasn’t “working,” per se; in fact, I was constantly texting colleagues about all sorts of juicy news: a reporter’s alleged affair with RFK Jr., flirtatious messages to a congresswoman, and this guy from the North Carolina Republican Party who might have been commenting profusely on a porn website. In conversation with my colleagues, this news was referred to as “Russian matryoshka WTF” and “kind of gross.” Anyway, here’s a recap of an absolutely standard 24 hours for salacious politicians. Enjoy.

RFK JR

RFK Jr. is facing another difficult moment — or maybe a good one — after reports emerged of his allegedly inappropriate relationship with New York magazine’s political reporter Olivia Nuzzi, who wrote a profile of the former presidential candidate last November. It wasn’t, I have to say, a terribly positive piece of reporting; Nuzzi described him as “the candidate Franken (Trump) helped create” and called the trip they took together “the longest two-mile car ride of my life” because his minivan was a “death machine” that “smelled so bad I thought I was going to pass out after about 15 seconds.” (The vehicle had apparently been run over by his three enormous dogs.)

And yet, according to Nuzzi’s statement, sometime after that stinking, crazy encounter, her communications with RFK Jr. “got personal.” She claims their relationship was never physical and didn’t begin until after her profile was published, but she was placed on leave for the investigation. Washingtonians have a lot of questions. Did this impact her coverage of the 2024 presidential race? (The initial NY Mag review said it didn’t.) Did it end her engagement to Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza? (This tweet calls her his “ex-fiancée,” so maybe.) And are brain worms contagious? Did she catch them?

NANCY MACE

Congresswoman Nancy Mace is in the news once again for being hot. After Vanderbilt professor Michael Eric Dyson criticized Mace on CNN for showing “disregard for the humanity of black people” by repeatedly mispronouncing “Kamala,” Mace responded with a screenshot of the flirty text exchange. After the CNN panel, Mace claims she sent Dyson a photo of them together; he apparently responded, “Shh, don’t tell anyone. We look good together!” before adding a kissy face emoji. (Responding to X, Dyson wrote: (“her tears and white woman lies serve lies and distortions”). This is great news for Mace. Not only does she make the critic look like a hypocrite, but she also put a photo of herself in the Congressional Record in a tight pink dress — one that even Michael Eric Dyson admits she looks gorgeous in.

MARK ROBINSON

Yesterday, CNN broke a sensational story about posts allegedly made by Mark Robinson, who is running for governor of North Carolina, on a porn site called “Nude Africa.” Robinson — a black Republican whom Trump has approvingly called “Martin Luther King on steroids” — allegedly referred to himself as a “black NAZI!”, which supports the restoration of slavery. (Robinson denies saying this or any of the other comments attributed to the profile.) A CNN review of “Nude Africa” posts also revealed comments expressing a love of transgender pornography (despite Robinson’s vocal opposition to trans rights) and a number of remarks that the site described as so “gratuitously sexual and lascivious in nature” that they were unfit for printing. Also, just for fun, in the section of the CNN article devoted to explaining how reporters identified the “Nude Africa” profile, one piece of evidence was his frequent use of the phrase “I don’t care about a fat frog’s ass.”