Elizabeth Warren is Not A Kinky Cougar: Sorry, Everyone
Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, grifters extraordinaire, held a press conference today that press, apparently, attended, perhaps in part to see if the duo’s lies would fall apart at the scene or later, when picked apart on social media. Turns out, why not both?
I enjoyed Ford Fischer’s livestream of this unintentional comedy masterpiece courtesy of News2Share. I recommend it, but only watch if you’re in a place where laughing incredulously won’t be disruptive unless you’re eager to discuss the absurdity of this “press conference” with anyone who can hear you. It’s got the plot of a badly written afternoon soap opera, so maybe that appeals.
So, in summary, US Marine Kelvin Whelly, 25, appeared on behalf of flim-flam men Wohl and Burkman to accuse Elizabeth Warren of being, essentially, an adulterous kinky cougar who booked him as a male escort (I think). He showed off a scar on his back that he claimed was from whip marks, despite having publicly shown off said scar on Instagram more than half a year ago. You would think that for all of this trouble, Wohl and Burkman could have just asked BDSM twitter what a whip mark looks like, and some Twue Dominant Man would’ve happily talked to them about it at length for hours. But I digress.
I particularly enjoyed(?) that Elizabeth Warren was said to have purchased the services of this strapping young man on Cowboys4Angels, in part because when I was a sex worker the women I had as clients were some of my favorites, I wish more women saw themselves as clients, and in part because married men all over the political spectrum book sex workers and people generally don’t care. I hope Whelly doesn’t want to work as an escort again, because this kind of thing is pretty frowned on in an industry where being discreet is vital. I will note that I did not see him on the site.
I believe this was meant to discredit Warren, not because of the adultery which, clearly, the right wing can’t make a platform, but because of the BDSM. I thought after 50 Shades of Grey made BDSM commonplace in Target, we were kind of all on the same page that yeah, people like to use some bondage and blindfolds and have some spanky with their hanky panky, but clearly Wohl and Burkman haven’t been on the internet.
Granted, Wohl and Burkman are both pretty confident despite having lots of failed smear attempts. They have the grit to call their Project 1599 “a group that does nothing but get to the truth and get to the bottom of things”, to the laughter of everyone who has ever heard them speak. But it’s important also to remember, on a more serious note, that these folks do have people listening to them, no matter how quickly their claims can be shown to be absurd. They used the serious public discussions of sexual assault and what to do about it to perpetuate their grifts. Survivors are raked through the coals because they *might* be lying. Meanwhile, Wohl regularly makes false accusations and that’s, apparently, totally ok to the many men who claim to care about false accusations. The confidence of a mediocre white man is not to be sniffed at, no matter how high on cocaine they clearly were when they came up with their latest smear campaign.
I don’t even LIKE Warren that much but this made me root for her.
As a sex worker, it’s frustrating to have someone claim they did escorting in order to shock people. Maybe, instead, Whelly, it would’ve been more shocking to talk about how many people end up needing to do gigs, including sex work, in order to survive after military service, because their veteran benefits are being slashed. But you didn’t do sex work, did you? You probably haven’t even engaged in kinky sex for fun. You just wanted to use any stigma against sex workers and kinky folks to disgust and titillate your audience, and not only did you fail, you got a lot of your research wrong.
FFS, too, learn how to pronounce Massachusetts. God damn.
PS: Cowboys4Angels, you need a copywriter, and I’m available, just saying.
