Category: South Carolina

CNN: ‘There Is Nothing in the Correspondence Proving Folks’ Claim That He Had an “Inappropriate Physical Relationship” with Haley’

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They buried the lede in the sixth paragraph, but that’s the payoff:

The blogger claiming to have had an affair with South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley has posted a series of text messages between himself and Haley’s campaign manager that appear to show the two men colluding about how to handle the forthcoming scandal.
The messages, covering a nine-day period earlier this month before conservative blogger Will Folks went public with his accusation against the Republican hopeful, were posted Wednesday morning on his website, FITSNews.com.
“I’m telling you man, we keep this under wraps and nh is going to win,” reads one text message from Haley campaign manager Tim Pearson to Folks on May 15.
Pearson and Folks swap worried messages about different reporters chasing the story, and one exchange suggests there may be a newsworthy photograph of Haley and Folks.
Pearson confirmed to CNN the authenticity of the text messages.
While Pearson and Folks make allusions to the “rumor,” there is nothing in the correspondence proving Folks’ claim that he had an “inappropriate physical relationship” with Haley in 2007.
But Folks has suggested that he has more text messages and e-mails from Haley proving the supposed affair. He has yet to make that evidence public.

If I claimed to have text messages proving that Will Folks snorts methamphetamine while masturbating to his personal DVD collection of “Hannah Montana” (Season One), would that get me linked by CNN? Probably not.

And if South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster got a search warrant and assigned a computer forensics lab to go over Will Folks’ hard drive with a fine-toothed comb seeking evidence of extortion, what would they find? I don’t know.

What I do know is that Will Folks is playing the “sue me for libel” game with a public figure, demanding that Nikki Haley prove a negative:

Team Haley’s response to our founding editor’s preemptive admission of an “inappropriate physical relationship” was to relentlessly smear his credibility as well as the credibility of this website. . . .
What have they not done, however?
Sued our founding editor for libel.

The “our founding editor” language, of course, indicates that Folks is writing in the third-person about himself, portraying himself as a victim of politically-motivated persecution:

“Oh, that horrible Nikki Haley! First the brazen hussy forced me to have sex with her, and now she has the effrontery to deny it! How dare they impugn my integrity! Why don’t they confront the conclusive proof? After all, I exchanged text messages with her campaign manager about a rumor! My credibility is sacrosanct! If they don’t sue me for libel, that proves I’m telling the truth — and they can’t handle the truth!”

Remember: People who know Folks describe him as “dangerous and unreliable,” and he has been accused of online stalking. And here are the key text-messages that Folks cites as proof, beginning with an exchange with Wes Donehue, a supporter of Haley rival Gresham Barrett:

From: Wes Donehue
To: Will Folks
Sent: May 13, 2010 2:55 PM
I just don’t know who has told more people, you or Nikki.

From: Wes Donehue
To: Will Folks
Sent: May 14, 2010 10:36 AM
Now, I don’t give a f— of you believe me or not. Your the one who screwed her. You’re the one who bragged about it. She’s the one who told BJ. Yall point fingers at your own damn selves and leave me the f— out of it.

Ask any lawyer: This is hearsay. Donehue is saying that Folks “bragged about it” and that Nikki Haley told BJ — her former campaign advisor B.J. Boling, now working for Barrett — about the alleged affair. But this overlooks the possibility that B.J. Boling is liar. Perhaps Nikki Haley never told Boling any such thing, and he’s now just disrguntled toward his former employer, he’s claiming that she admitted an affair in order to damage her and help his current employer.

The one thing I don’t doubt for a minute is that Will Folks is a braggart, and also a drama queen. Six days later, Folks is freaking out because he believes Associated Press reporter Jim Davenport is writing a story about the rumor:

From: Will Folks
To: Tim Pearson
Sent: May 20, 2010 4:29 PM
F—ing nuts. People saying davenport story is imminent. I am honestly losing my mind a little.

Meanwhile, weekly tabloid reporter Corey Hutchins is also chasing the rumor:

From: Will Folks
To: Tim Pearson
Sent: May 21, 2010 6:55 AM
My sources indicate Hutchins is running next week (possibly cover) and Davenport is trying to beat him to the punch.

Count me as having ceased to be remotely interested in whether or not anything “inappropriate” actually transpired between Will Folks and Haley — or between Will Folks and the Haley family’s housekeeper, or between Will Folks and the Haley family’s Labrador retriever. What is indisputably proven by these text messages:

  • Folks bears primary responsibility for the rumor, having bragged to several people that he had an affair with Nikki Haley.
  • Two people with the Gresham Barrett campaign — one of them a former Haley employee — were trying to turn the rumor into a full-blown scandal, three weeks before the GOP primary.
  • When Folks realized that the rumor he started was about to be reported as a news story, he freaked completely out.

Why the freakout? A fair and accurate story, written by a competent professional reporter, would have identified Will Folks as the primary source of the rumors. Folks had been running his mouth for three years, and now he was about to be exposed as a two-faced backstabber.

“I am honestly losing my mind a little.”

Yeah. Game’s up, buddy. And your mind ain’t all you’re losing. However this story ends for Nikki Haley — and right now, it looks like she’s winning — it will end very, very badly for Will Folks. Once you become a regular punchline for Ace of Spades . . .

Say, whatever happened to Jackie Mackie Paisley Passey, anyway?

OMG: Did You See What Haley Accuser Will Folks Wrote About Ashley Herzog?

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Jesse Hathaway is a friend of a friend. I encouraged Jesse with his blog, Athens Runaway. Jesse went to college with blogger Ashley Herzog, whom I met at CPAC 2008. We’ll let Jesse take the story from there:

Folks has… a bad attitude towards women. And that’s understating it. To give an example, he stalked a close personal friend of mine, Ashley Herzog, creeping on her Flickr picture and making lewd blog entries about her, in which he talked about how Herzog, whom he described as a “20-something blonde Republicans [wearing] green eye shadow, black lace tops, pink dirty nothings and too much blush” made him “pull wood.”
Creeping on her again, Folks wrote about her “toying seductively with her ice water. Which according to a quick check of our dirty imaginations is… yup, even hotter.”

OK, to establish some bona fides: I’m the originator of Rule 5 (“Everybody loves a pretty girl”) and the guy who figured out how to deploy Google-bombs to make sure left-wing blogs couldn’t get traffic from using words like “bikini” or “nude” in conjunction with the names of conservative women. I’ve got an irreverent sense of humor, and can’t resist a double-entendre. 

A very happily married father of six — my daughter’s wedding is in July — I am nonetheless sympathetic to those young fellows whose  admiration of pulchritude is more concupiscent than aesthetic. After all, when I was a 20-something bachelor, I worked briefly as a DJ in Atlanta strip clubs. (I was a hell-bound Democrat back then.)

All of which is to explain that I am not easily shocked or offended by bawdy antics, but . . . “pull wood” ? I’m sorry. No, that’s wrong.

It’s one thing to cut up in the comments at Aces of Spades HQ. It’s one thing to confess your, um, ardent admiration for a movie star you’re never going to meet in a million years (e.g., Christina Hendricks, Natalie Portman, Anne Hathaway). 

However, for a Republican political consultant to employ the phrase “pull wood” when writing about a conservative journalist fresh out of college . . . well, you see why South Carolina sources considered Folks “dangerous and unreliable.”

Notice, by the way, that in the creeptastic post about Herzog, Folks used the “our founding editor” phrase that has appeared in some more recent FITSNews posts about Nikki Haley.

UPDATE: Via Red State, Ace of Spades and Verum Serum, here’s the creeptastic video in which Will Folks simulates a rather disturbing interview with Nikki Haley:

UPDATE II: What an absolute lying scumbag he is:

“My advice was that she and her husband sit down on a sofa together and talk about it the way (President) Clinton did,” Folks said in an interview with The Post and Courier Tuesday.
Folks said they had been in communication for two weeks before he posted his admission Monday that he and Haley had an “inappropriate physical relationship” before Folks got married. He told the Associated Press that the relationship happened in 2007, while he was working for Haley, writing speeches and news releases.
He wouldn’t say if he had intercourse with her but he said it was “inappropriate sexual contact,” it happened more than once and it ended by mutual decision.

So all that crap Monday about how he would have nothing further to say — yeah, that was a lie, too.

He’s e-mailing reporters, giving interviews to papers, and probably by January he’ll be standing on a street corner in Columbia hassling people leaving the inauguration:

 “Hey, I once got all sexy with her, y’know. Yeah, we were going at it hot and heavy. Don’t you recognize me? I used to be famous. . . . Say, can I bum one of your smokes there, pal? You wouldn’t happen to have a buck you could spare, would you? I’m a Vietnam vet, y’see, but they kicked me out of the homeless shelter and . . .”

The issue here, not to put too fine a point on it, is that Folks is acting like such a despicable worm — “a low rent piece of white trash,” as Dan Riehl pungently describes him — that you can’t believe a word he says.

Furthermore, let’s be clear: In the modern world, men and women work together. We do not institute sharia-style gender apartheid, because it is assumed that co-workers are capable of conducting themselves responsibly and professionally in such situations. It would be a terrible thing if a female candidate could not employ a male press secretary (or vice-versa) without it being inferred that they were sexually intimate.

If Folks habitually exploits work-related opportunities to “score” — which, according to both Michael Brendan Dougherty and my own sources, seems to be his modus operandi — then his behavior is antithetical to the entire concept of professionalism in the modern workplace.

Who would hire that kind of person in a position of trust? That’s what really shocked me about the whole Lewinsky scandal: The President of the United States is such a hopeless horndog that all it takes is a chubby intern flashing her panties, and next thing you know, he’s soliciting fellatio in the Oval Office?

OK, so when I was a young fool in my 20s (and a hell-bound Democrat), I was easily distracted. In fact, I met my wife at the newspaper office in Calhoun, Ga., and . . . uh, well.

My point is that if Will Folks was such a compulsive skirt-chaser that he couldn’t be trusted alone with a female candidate (or a female consultant, or a female reporter, or Maria the housekeeper at the Days Inn), then maybe he never should have been employed as a Republican political operative. I have often complained about GOP staffers being too buttoned-down and uptight, but as an alternative to creeptastic Will Folks maniacally humping everything with a pulse, buttoned-down and uptight looks a lot more appealing.

Deuce Bigalow, Blogger Gigolo: Latest Developments in the Folks-Haley Saga; BUMPED: ‘Dangerous and Unreliable’

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* BUMPED 9:15 p.m. ET – SEE UPDATE BELOW *

If blogger/consultant/man-whore Will Folks has accomplished nothing else by his boast of an “inappropriate physical relationship” with Nikki Halely, there’s no denying that he has provided a target-rich environment for snark. (Ace was classic.)

The fundamental question is this: Out of all the bloggers on the planet, why would an attractive married woman like Nikki Haley choose to have an affair with a complete douchebag like Will Folks? Even if you consider such a scenario as being within the realm of possibility — as does Michael Brendan Dougherty — there can be no doubt that Folks has made a complete laughingstock of himself, and destroyed whatever career prospect he ever had as a political consultant. He’s as radioactive as Chernobyl.

But let us suppose, hypothetically, that Folks is the irresistible stud he claims to be and that, like untold thousands of other women, Nikki Haley fell victim to his seductive magnetism. (She unequivocally denies it.)

Now further suppose that the rumor-mill is turning and reporters are asking questions. What do you do, if you’ve got half a brain in your head? You shut the hell up, is what you do.

The fact that Will Folks can’t seem to shut up about his “inappropriate” relationship is Exhibit A in this case. Exhibit B is that he writes his blog with weird third-person references to “our founding editor,” as if he expects readers to believe that this is anything other than sock puppetry. Typical of been-too-long-in-the-basement paranoia, he’s spinning tales of persecution by “Team Haley” and talking about “our lawyers.” And now — get this — he’s suggesting e-mails and phone records as proof of what he calls “Haley-Gate”:

All we can tell you for now is that the record of correspondence between the two of them began on November 20, 2005 – with an email sent at 8:33 a.m. from Haley’s State House email address ([email protected]) to Will Folks’ personal address ([email protected]) in which Haley complimented Folks on an article he had written praising her gubernatorial ambitions. . . .
That four-and-a-half year record of correspondence ended on Saturday, May 22, 2010 – three days ago – with a text message sent from Folks’ cell phone to Haley’s cell phone at 1:04 p.m. alerting her to the fact that he had been placed in a position where he felt that he had no choice but to address the rumors regarding their relationship on his website.

(Via Memeorandum.) Hey, douchebag: Publish the e-mails or shut the hell up. I’ve got $20 that says you can’t produce an e-mail proving an affair with Nikki Haley. What you are doing is demanding that Haley prove a negative.

Will Folks has already proven one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt: He is a vicious monster.

If he did have an “inappropriate” relationship with Nikki Haley, his actions were dishonorable, proving him to be untrustworthy and disrespectful. And in that case, he would have been doubly dishonorable to “admit” to a rumor that he himself probably played a key role in spreading.

On the other hand, if Will Folks is lying — and who would accept his word against hers? — he is unspeakably vicious.

I’ll get back to laughing at this douchebag later, but right now I’m thinking that if I was Nikki Haley’s huband, the next news story about Will Folks would be his obituary.

Ace goes back to the Comstock Lode of comedy gold:

On the one hand, Will Folks assures me he’s a straight shooter who calls it like he sees it and is so full of integrity and courage that in some countries the oath to tell the truth is made upon one of his incorruptible bowel movements. . . .
I really, really have a problem with guys who never shut up about how uncompromising and courageous and principled they are.

Ace calls attention to this interesting story:

[Folks] says he was pressured to disclose the affair by the campaign of fellow candidate Gresham Barrett. . . .
Folks elaborated in an email Monday night that he believes Barrett is behind the takedown. “All of my sources pointed their fingers directly at the campaign of Gresham Barrett,” Folks wrote. . . .
Barrett spokesman Luke Byars categorically denied that any pressure on Folks came from the Barrett campaign. “This is absolutely not true,” Byars said. “Mr. Folks seems to be full of allegations lately without any proof.”

So, while Folks claimed that he was reluctantly making an admission, he’s now exchanging e-mails with reporters throwing more dirt at people. Politics ain’t beanbag, as James Carville likes to say, and if Will Folks thought he could play this kind of game without consequences, I ssupect he’s about to get a very brutal education.

By the way, because I’m so uncompromising and courageous and principled: I categorically deny any accusation that I ever had “inappropriate” thoughts about Dede Scozzafava.

UPDATE 9:15 p.m. ET: Will Folks was considered “dangerous and unreliable” by some Republicans in South Carolina, according to one source who knows him.

“He’s very smart, but at the same time, he’s stupid, too,” the source said.

Folks’ loose-cannon reputation and his blog’s frequent attacks on powerful Republicans in the state have long made him an object of intense scrutiny. It has been rumored that politicians he’s targeted have been digging for dirt on him for years.

As to the question of whether Folks actually had an affair with Haley, my source gave it a “50-50” chance of being true. Folks is known to “have a way with the ladies,” said the source, confirming Michael Brendan Dougherty’s report.

True or false, what would have been Folks’ motive for making the “admission”? My source was as puzzled as everyone else. Rumors had circulated for more than a year in South Carolina about Folks and Haley, but rumors are just rumors.

A post Tuesday afternoon at Folks’ blog says he was “pressured by impending media reports that would damage his family.” But if his spouse already knew the truth, what harm could Folks suffer from these “impending media reports”? A couple of wild guesses on my part:

  • Reckless as ever, Folks could have spoken to a reporter and been bluffed into saying something about Haley that — once it made news — she would know could only have come from him. So he panicked and issued the Monday statement.
  • It may be that Folks was in essence being blackmailed, threatened with disclosure of other damaging information about him — not the Haley rumors — and published his “admission” to forestall that disclosure.

The Tuesday afternoon post at Folks’ blog said “the story of the Folks-Haley affair was being pushed by several operatives with ties to the campaign of U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett.” You have ask yourself: What other secrets could someone know about Folks “that would damage his family”? What else might he be threatened by?

Folks is now married (he says the Haley affair was before he was married) but, according to Dougherty, Folks was once reported to have seduced “nearly every female consultant in the state.” In fact, when he worked on Sanford’s gubernatorial campaign in 2002 — and was living in the basement of Sanford’s mansion on posh Sullivan’s Island — Folks was said to have been romantically involved with a TV reporter for a South Carolina station.

Does such a compulsive womanizer drop his philandering habit on his wedding day? Does a leopard change his spots?

Well, so much for wild guesses. One thing my source is sure about — Haley has offended the “old boys network” in South Carolina. In addition to Barrett, her opponents in the GOP gubernatorial primary include the state attorney general Henry McMaster — who obviously would have access to any law-enforcement records on Folks.

Politics is a dirty business everywhere, but especially rough in South Carolina, where the legendary GOP operative Lee Atwater learned his craft. Nikki Haley is paying a heavy price for taking on the “good old boys.”

Nikki Haley Is Now Nationally Famous for Not — Not — Having Sex With a Blogger

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Hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned:

State ethics filings available online indicate that Haley’s campaign for State Senate paid Will Folks’s company, Viewpolitik, a bit more than $1,100 in consulting fees for the months of January and February of that year, along with a reimbursement of $173.50. . . .
South Carolina Republicans said he’s paid by a number of Republican candidates, though often listed as a subcontractor because he is a controversial figure.

So maybe his motive for saying he got some action from the candidate was that he wasn’t getting any financial action this time around?

I’ve heard of consultants getting screwed by campaigns, but . . .

UPDATE: This is my second post on this story, but the first post was getting too long, and now the story’s developing rapidly. Ben Domenech was also on the story early and updates:

Columbia’s alternative paper reports that rumors originally surfaced over a year ago. That would square with what I’m told — it’d be around the time Folks got pushed off Haley’s payroll after some minor consultant work — but this is all still hearsay. Haley’s denial remains unequivocal.

UPDATE II:  Michael Brendan Dougherty says we’re underestimating the Will-Meister:

I happen to know that Will Folks is a bit of a ladies man. He is very funny, extremely capable, and a raconteur. From what I hear, Folks is rumored to have had “physical relationships” with nearly every female consultant in the state. His affair with Haley supposedly began after he had done some writing work for her.

Well, everybody knows Republican political consultants are notorious whores, but . . .

UPDATE III: The point of the headline, in case you don’t get it, is that it would be unusual if Haley did have sex with a blogger. As a rule, we bloggers spend all our time staring at our SiteMeters and begging Instapundit for linkage, so we don’t have much time for l’amour. 

Evidently the Will-Meister has found a way around that. Maybe they should get him to present a seminar at Right Online: “How to Run a Successful Blog and Also Get Jiggy With Every Female Consultant in the State.”

To analyze the scorned-consultant angle: The primary is June 8, and Folks isn’t getting paid by Haley this year. She just got endorsed by Sarah Palin, which means the money ought to be rolling in, so . . . Well, you do the math. Palin isn’t surprised:

Well, whaddya know? South Carolina’s conservative candidate, Nikki Haley, recently zipped to the front of the line in her state’s race for governor; and lo and behold, now accusations of an affair surface.

You betcha!

UPDATE IV: Add Dan Riehl to the list of bl0ggers that Nikki Haley never had sex with. You see how this could spiral out of control. Once word gets around that a chick dates bloggers . . .

UPDATE V: Ace of Spades also never had sex with Nikki Haley. However, Margaret Thatcher  . . .

UPDATE VI: Will Folks cites as his “smoking gun” (no pun intended) a report that the rumor was being pursued by a free weekly alternative tabloid in Columbia, S.C.

Full stop.

My head just exploded. You’re compelled to “admit” (brag, really) that you banged a politician because you were afraid one of those scrungy little weeklies with the transvestite-hooker ads in the back was going to write about a rumor?

Wait — this breaking news flash just in:

WILL FOLKS IS A CLUELESS DOUCHEBAG

EXPECT UPDATES . . .

The Kind of Blog Post That You’re Thankful Someone Else Wrote

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South Carolina conservative blogger Will Folks confesses to having once, er, dated the married Republican gubernatorial candidate he’s been promoting:

Several years ago, prior to my marriage, I had an inappropriate physical relationship with Nikki.

Dude. Republicans already treat bloggers like whores, metaphorically. Now they’ll actually be expecting us to put out.

For the record, Nikki Haley calls this accusation “categorically and totally false.”

Bloggers just makin’ stuff up? I thought that was the media’s job.

At any rate, if GOP candidates think they can impose on me for sexual favors — trying to cop a feel in the backseat, telling me that they’ll “respect” me in the morning — they’re sadly mistaken. I’m not one of these blog-floozies like Will Folks, who lets sex-starved Republican women use and degrade him to satisfy their depraved lust.

Rumors that bathroom walls throughout South Carolina are scrawled with graffiti declaring Will Folks to be  “a dirty little GOP whore-boy” have not been confirmed. Yet.

UPDATE: Brian O’Connor at Red Dog Report:

[T]hese rumors do seem to be perfectly timed to take advantage of Haley’s popularity in the polls and recent Palin endorsement, to maximize the number of hits to Will Folk’s website.

Hey, I’ve got nothing against maximizing the hits, but there are limits even to my shamelessness. (You’ll notice I never actually posted the Hannah Giles bikini photo.) As to the Folks-Haley rumor, Erick Erickson sums it up best:

It’s a Rule of Nature: Hot Women Don’t Have Affairs With Ugly Poor Guys

The brutal truth. And despite my fabulous wealth and notorious Speedo, I’ve managed to avoid any compromising situations with the hordes of love-crazed blog-groupies who stalk me like teenage girls following the Jonas Brothers.

UPDATE II: If Disney’s looking to do a movie about this story, Dan Riehl’s got a title:

Honey, I Schtupped the Candidate

Starring Rick Moranis as Will Folks!

UPDATE III: Melissa Clouthier:

As usual, Stacy McCain makes me laugh.

Dr. Melissa has also managed to resist the love-crazed blog-groupies.

UPDATE IV: Thanks to the Associated Press, we now have this photograph of Will Folks, a.k.a., Deuce Bigalow, Blogger Gigolo. The AP reports:

In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press prior to his blog post, Folks would not discuss details of the relationship.
“I’m not going to paint pictures,” said Folks, who gave the interview on the condition his statements would not be published before he went public.

Right. And if the Associated Press starts asking questions about rumors that I had an “inappropriate relationship” with Alyssa Milano’s Twitter feed, I’m not going to “discuss details,” either.

Don’t judge me!