Jay Parmley and Rebecca Burgin
Last week, we noted that Jay Parmley, who was forced to resign as executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party after being accused of sexually harassing a 26-year-old male staffer, had claimed to be the victim of “right-wing political enemies.”
Alas, it appears that the real victim was a young Oklahoma woman who says Parmley infected her with the AIDS virus:
Parmley’s ex-girlfriend Rebecca Burgin told TheDC that Parmley forever changed her life by making her HIV-positive. She’s worried, she said, that Parmley may have done to someone else what he did to her.
“My motivation for talking to you was that I have read the articles, I have read the letter [that Ortega sent to Parmley detailing sexual harassment allegations] and everything like that,” Burgin said.
“And after Jay and I broke up, the biggest concern that I had was, ‘what if this happened to somebody else? Would he do this to someone else?’ … My biggest concern is for anybody else that has had a relationship with him that he did not tell.” . . .
“When Jay and I met, I was 20 and he was 32,” she said. “To me, it seems to be a pattern, potentially… The unnerving thing to me is that it looks like he uses his position of authority to prey on younger adults.” . . .
Parmley served as national president of the Young Democrats of America from 1999 to 2001, then becoming executive director and chairman of the Oklahoma Democratic Party until 2005. . . .
In 2005 he left Oklahoma to become a Mississippi state liaison to the Democratic National Committee under chairman Howard Dean, during the former Vermont governor’s 50-state strategy campaign. He took a similar role in South Carolina in 2007, and became executive director of the South Carolina Democratic Party in 2009. In May 2011, the North Carolina Democratic Party hired him as its executive director. . . .
“I met him — I was a student in college and he was my American Government professor,” she told TheDC in a phone interview. “Upon completing that class, we started dating. We dated for a little over three years.” . . .
Around October 2006, after more than 14 months of a long-distance relationship, Parmley became “debilitating[ly] sick” in Mississippi, she said.
Former Mississippi Democratic Party chairman Rickey Cole told TheDC that he and his wife took Parmley to the hospital “because he had lost a great deal of weight and couldn’t keep anything in his stomach.”
And then came Thanksgiving, when Burgin said she was hit with the news that would change her life forever.
“He had called my parents and asked them that they call me and have me come over,” Burgin said, “and that I needed to call him. And so I called him, and it was at that point that he told me the doctors had tested him for HIV. And that he was HIV positive. And that I needed to be tested.” . . .
Read the whole thing, a great story by Matthew Boyle at the Daily Caller.
Notice that Parmley was employed at the top levels of the Democratic Party — as national director of Young Democrats, in Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Carolina and North Carolina — for more than a dozen years before his sexual predations were publicly exposed.
Indeed, according to Burgin’s account, top Democratic officials knew Parmley was HIV-positive more than five years ago, which might have been seen as a huge clue that Parmley was up to no good.
Of course, such an interpretation — that AIDS infection might be evidence of dangerous proclivities — could be seen as “discrimination,” and Democrats consider discrimination a greater danger than an incurable sexually-transmitted disease. And remember that when Parmley was accused of sexually harassing a 26-year-old male aide, North Carolina Democratic Party officials tried to cover it up with a financial settlement, even though Parmley’s high-risk behavior had already victimized at least one other young person. Also remember, as Ed Morrissey says, to keep Rebecca Burgin in your prayers.
