REPORT: Apparently, at least part of this story was very well known amid the political circles (pundits, columnists, reporters etc.) who swirl around the various presidential campaign camps.
COMING CLEAN: From what I know, at least 2 of the women named as Cruz mistresses by the National Enquirer are accurate #TRUMP#CRUZ#TCOT
It appears the sexual exploits of Ted Cruz was the story many were curious about back in late February and early March.
A Breitbart reporter held the information but never released it; according to most common speculation because the owners/operators/editors of the outlet determined it was not in alignment with their political affiliations:
For those of you less familiar with Twitter and “Hashtags” there was a considerable amount of apparent discussion under the hashtag “#TheThing“, where “The Thing” was knowledge of the Ted Cruz affairs.
If you look up #TheThing and go back to March 10th – March 14th, what you’ll find are multiple conversations about finding someone, anyone, to report on the Ted Cruz affairs. The group pushing for the requested articles were seemingly all supporters of Marco Rubio.
The apparent thinking was if they could get the media to pick-up the story prior to Super Tuesday, it would finish off Ted Cruz and allow Marco Rubio to win in several key elections and states.
Unfortunately, the truth-tellers ran into the corporate side of the media enterprises. Breitbart owned by pro-Cruz Super-PAC funder Robert Mercer was one of the roadblocks. The editor, Ben Shapiro, also now being named as one of the political advocates who would not allow his chosen candidate to be ‘outed”. Shapiro is also the Editor of The Daily Wire, which is also owned by a Pro-Cruz Super-PAC team, The Wilks Brothers.
It appears Shapiro buried and blocked the story because he, along with others, didn’t want to see Cruz negatively impacted. Unfortunately, this is brutal confirmation of the type of media bias we have discussed before.
Pro-Rubio and Pro-Cruz corporate media intercepts refusing to allow sunlight upon their preferred candidate(s). (Salem Communications: Hugh Hewitt et al, NRO, Human Events, Twitchy, etc) and Pro-Cruz sites like Conservative Review (Mark Levin, and unfortunately Amanda Carpenter), Right Scoop, Red State, Insurgent etc. with an obvious reason to bury or not allow the story to surface.
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REPORT: Late last year, when several women accused adult star James Deen of rape and sexual assault, it seemed the porn industry’s golden boy had fallen. The details of the disturbing allegations made international news. Two major porn studios blacklisted him. He lost his advice columnist gig at The Frisky. A columnist at the Observer wrote that his “career seems effectively over.”
But it isn’t. Nearly four months after the allegations first surfaced, Deen’s career appears to be doing just fine. Fans are searching for his scenes just as often as they did before the accusations, and studios are releasing just as many movies featuring him, according to data obtained by Vocativ.
On November 28 of 2015, Deen’s ex-girlfriend Stoya took to Twitter to accuse him of rape. In the days that followed, several other women came forward with stories of sexual assault, abuse, boundary violations and excessive roughness, both on and off set. The following month, searches for “James Deen” on xHamster, a major porn website, more than tripled from the month before, leaping from 338 to 1,083 searches, according to data provided by the site.
That spike appears to be an anomaly, perhaps in response to the media frenzy around Deen. In January, that number dropped by more than half to 559 searches—but last month, it was back to the three-hundred range, just as it was in September, October and November.
Deen, who owns his own production company, James Deen Productions, is getting just as many outside gigs as before, according to a representative. “James is continuing to perform in scenes for other companies the same amount as he was before,” said Howard Bragman, chairman of Fifteen Minutes Public Relations, which represents Deen, in an email. When asked about companies like Kink and Evil Angel, which cut ties with the performer in response to the allegations, Bragman said, “Any defections were made up by new partnerships and his business is growing as it has been for a number of years.”
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REPORT: A few years ago, Bree Olson was on top of the world. She was a Penthouse pet and the star of hundreds of adult movies. She’d made headlines for being one of Charlie Sheen’s live-in “goddesses” (though the relationship ended, as most of Sheen’s relationships do). When she retired in 2011, her success in porn led her to achieve the type of elusive mainstream success that most porn stars aspire to, with supporting roles in films like The Human Centipede 3and her very own webseries.
In most respects, Olson has had the career that most porn girls dream about. Which is why it came as something of a surprise when she posted the following admonition to aspiring porn stars on Twitter:
In an email to the Daily Dot, Olson said she was inspired to write the note earlier this week, after yet another young woman asked if she should go into the porn industry. “At least once a week I’ll have a teenage girl ask for my advice on it and my answer remains the same—I tell them not to,” she told the Daily Dot.
Although Olson insists that she has no problem with the porn industry itself, and that her experiences there were largely positive, she says that the worst part about doing porn is the discrimination that women face after they leave the industry. For instance, she says that once she reached out to an underwear company that had sponsored one of her YouTube projects by sending a polite email expressing interest in modeling for them. She thought she might have a shot, as she described the company as “chill” and very “open.”
“In many of their photos on their Instagram their models are even topless,” she said.
Yet the company responded by telling her that they didn’t think she was a good fit because her Instagram was too “inappropriate”—despite the fact that she is fully clothed in the vast majority of her photos.
“They don’t like that I did porn. That’s it,” she said. “I can give you so many examples. Almost daily. But it happens all the time.”
Olson’s right—sex workers are frequently the target of discrimination, even long after they’ve left the industry. Even in an age where porn and sex work are considered “mainstream,” a number of teachers have been fired from their jobs after their porn pasts were discovered, such as Stacie Halas, a California teacher who was fired by the Oxnard School Board after it was discovered that she’d performed in 11 hardcore sex scenes.
The former porn star Gauge was outed at and subsequently fired from a job as a surgical technician, despite the fact that she was at the top of her class. For years afterward, she was unable to get work, forcing her to return to the industry.
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The National Enquirer’s March 25 issue features a bombshell accusation against 2016 Republican presidential contender Ted Cruz: he’s been having an affair with five different women. While the Enquirer didn’t name any names and ran only pixelated photos, the Twittersphere has been rife with speculation and Internet detective work under the hashtag #CruzSexScandal. Internet detectives claim to have identified three of the five women whose pixelated likenesses appear in the Enquirer story, two of whom worked on other candidates’ campaigns in 2016 and one of whom worked for his own.
The “story” has dominated Twitter, with #CruzSexScandal trending worldwide and allegations of hush money and questions about what the other candidates knew flying, especially in light of Cruz’s recent high-profile spat with Donald Trump over the use of Melania Trump’s photo in campaign ads. But there are plenty of reasons to be more than a little skeptical of the Enquirer’s report.
Here’s what you need to know:
1. Twitter Users Identified Three Women from the Enquirer’s Photos
The Enquirer’s photos paired with those of Katrina Pierson, Sarah Isgur Flores and Amanda Carpenter. (Twitter)
While the Enquirer ran poorly pixelated photos of the women it claimed were having affairs, it didn’t take long for Twitter to figure out their identities. Internet radio host Bob Zicari posted the following to his Twitter account shortly after the story broke:
From left to right, the women identified in the photos are Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson, former Carly Fiorina staffer Sarah Isgur Flores, and former Cruz communications director Amanda Carpenter. Carpenter is married, while Flores and Pierson are not.
It’s important to note that the women identified in the photos are so far only confirmed to have their photos used in an Enquirer story.
2. Cruz Is Accused of Paying “Hush Money” to Fiorina Over His Alleged Affair with a Staffer
Sarah Isgur Flores with a fellow Fiorina aide in 2016. (Twitter)
Sarah Isgur Flores served as Carly Fiorina’s deputy campaign manager during her 2016 run for President. During the early stages of that campaign in July 2015, a Ted Cruz-affiliated Super PAC, Keep the Promise I, donated $500,000 to rival Carly Fiorina’s official campaign fund. The Washington Post noted that the donation was “unusual” at the time. Since the Enquirer’s accusations, however, Twitter users have alleged that the donation was “hush money” to keep silent about the affair:
It bears repeating that no one has proof of anything, and Fiorina has herself endorsed and campaigned with Cruz since ending her campaign. Moreover, a photo from Flores’s Twitter shows Fiorina and the Cruz family being quite friendly:
A Ted Cruz-affiliated Super PAC gave $500,000 to Carly Fiorina’s campaign, a staffer with whom, Sarah Isgur Flores, is accused of having an affair with Cruz. Was it hush money?
Sarah Isgur Flores is a Republican strategist who used to work for the Carly Fiorina campaign. Flores is getting attention today because of the so-called “Ted Cruz sex scandal.”
3. Katrina Pierson Works for Trump as a Spokesperson
Ted Cruz and Katrina Pierson during her 2014 Congressional campaign. (Getty)
Katrina Pierson, a spokesperson for Donald Trump, is one of the women accused by the Enquirer of an affair with Cruz. Her current employer and the timing of the announcement have led to skepticism about the story, including this bit from left-leaning blog Crooks and Liars:
The pictures they weakly disguise are pretty easy to match up with people. The image above suggests that Katrina Pierson is one of his so-called mistresses, as well as others.
It feels to me like Trump dropped a whole lot of garbage over at the Enquirer to discredit Ted Cruz, and that sense is backed up even more by the fact that one of the lovely ladies is supposedly Donald Trump’s spokeswoman.
Pierson herself dismissed the idea of a scandal before she was named, in a manner that suggests no love lost between the two:
Cruz and Pierson do have a prior professional relationship through Texas politics. In 2014, Katrina Pierson challenged incumbent Republican Representative Pete Sessions’s seat, and was ultimately unsuccessful in garnering the nomination. During that run, however, the Cruz family had high praise for her. Rafael Cruz, a Texan preacher and the father of 2016 candidate Ted, endorsed her run, calling her a “strict constitutionalist.” The younger Cruz had called her “a fearless, principled conservative.”
Katrina Pierson, spokesperson for Republican 2016 frontrunner has been accused of carrying on an affair with Republican rival Ted Cruz. Here’s what you need to know.
4. Trump Threatened to “Spill the Beans” Shortly Before the Story Broke
A PAC supporting Ted Cruz ran Facebook ads featuring this nude photo from Donald Trump’s wife Melania. (Twitter)
Make America Awesome, a PAC supporting Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz, ran the ad seen above on Facebook ads in Utah ahead of the state’s caucus. Trump called Cruz out on Twitter, including a cryptic threat:
Lyin' Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a G.Q. shoot in his ad. Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!
It’s unclear what Trump meant by his comments, fueling speculation in light of the Enquirer’s accusations, and the woman on his payroll involved with them.
Donald Trump objected via Twitter to a Ted Cruz-affiliated PAC running Facebook ads featuring a nude photo of his wife Melania Trump in Utah. Read more about the ad and their exchange here.
5. Breitbart Supposedly Had Similar Evidence, but Did Not Publish
Breitbart writer Allum Bokhari reportedly had evidence on the scandal but did not publish. (Twitter)
Multiple Twitter users claimed that Breitbart reporter Allum Bokhari had evidence of the affairs but hesitated to publish it. Bokhari fueled such speculation with a tweet the night the story broke:
Multiple Twitter users reported a Breitbart outage in the time following the break, leading to speculation that information-hungry users crashed the site:
It’s worth noting that Breitbart has steadfastly (and controversially) supported Trump in this election cycle. Two employees resigned when the site refused to back them up over an alleged assault of reporter Michelle Fields by Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, and McKay Coppins of Buzzfeed reported that several anonymous Breitbart staffers claimed Trump was directly funding the site:
According to four sources with knowledge of the situation, editors and writers at the outlet have privately complained since at least last year that the company’s top management was allowing Trump to turn Breitbart into his own fan website—using it to hype his political prospects and attack his enemies. One current editor called the water-carrying ‘despicable’ and ’embarrassing,’ and said he was told by an executive last year that the company had a financial arrangement with Trump. A second Breitbart staffer said he had heard a similar description of the site’s relationship with the billionaire but didn’t know the details; and a third source at the company said he knew of several instances when managers had overruled editors at Trump’s behest. Additionally, a conservative communications operative who works closely with Breitbart described conversations in which “multiple writers and editors” said Trump was paying for the ability to shape coverage, and added that one staffer claimed to have seen documentation of the ‘pay for play.’
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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
