a democrat running for senate is accused of using the f-slur on her staff. her least likely defender was george santos, using it too.

Photo: Leah Herman, House Creative Services, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

via Alaska's News Source, PinkNews and Attitude, reporting on a New York Times investigation, plus the post itself and the House roll call.

Of all the people who could have leapt to Mary Peltola's defense this week, the universe selected George Santos.

Start with what was actually reported. On Wednesday the New York Times published an account of Peltola's time in the House built on interviews with nine former staffers, Alaska's News Source reports. Four of them, according to Attitude, told the Times they personally heard her use the anti-gay slur, sometimes about members of her own staff. The Times also reported she used an ableist slur in a text and pushed an aide during an argument over a missing memo.

what the peltola campaign says

Peltola, the Democrat trying to unseat Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan in Alaska, denies using the anti-gay slur. Her campaign has acknowledged the ableist one, sent in a text this year, and said she regrets it, PinkNews and Attitude report. It has disputed other parts of the story too. Spokesperson Harry Child pointed to 2023, when she lost her mother and her husband within a few months. "Like any person who has gone through multiple personal tragedies in a few months, Mary sometimes struggled to deal with her grief," he said in a statement to Alaska's News Source. "But she treats her staff with respect and care."

The campaign told Fox News the reporting was "exaggerating and outright lying about moments from the hardest period of her life." On Wednesday night she held a town hall and walked past reporters without answering, Alaska's News Source reports. Sullivan's spokesman, Nate Adams, offered that "these are not new revelations."

enter george santos

On Thursday afternoon the openly gay former congressman quoted a post about the story and wrote: "So she speaks her mind?" His next sentence was built around the slur itself, in the plural, applied to all of Washington. Then: "I can't believe I'm defending Mary who voted to expel me." It had more than 6,000 likes by Friday.

She did vote to expel him. The House roll call for Dec. 1, 2023, shows Peltola among the 311 members who voted yes, against 114 who voted no.

So here is where the week lands. A Democrat in a competitive Senate race is accused of using a slur about her own gay staff, and denies it. The loudest voice saying it would be fine if she had is a man who was thrown out of Congress, partly by her, and who used the word in his defense of her. Nobody asked for this ally. Nobody ever does.