Howard Fineman reported that at HuffPo on March 9, and it went under the radar for several weeks until our own Alex Pappas mentioned it last week. Coincidentally or not, the very next day, Judd announced she’s not running for the Senate.
Again, here’s what Fineman wrote:
Judd has some prominent backers in the state, led by Rep. John Yarmuth of Louisville; Christy Brown, whose family controls the Brown-Forman distilling fortune; and Brown’s son-in-law Matthew Barzun, the former ambassador to Sweden (and probable future ambassador to the United Kingdom), who was Obama’s finance chairman in the 2012 campaign…
Judd made her intentions clear at a private dinner last month at Brown’s Louisville home. Asked if she was tough enough to take on McConnell and the GOP national attack machine, Judd reportedly answered, “I have been raped twice, so I think I can handle Mitch McConnell.”
I haven’t heard about Judd confirming or denying this, but one of her advisers is now saying it never happened. Jonathan Miller writes at the Daily Beast about “the small coterie of state Democrats who duped the national press and helped nudge her out of the Senate race”:
The past several weeks had seemed like a dizzying blur of false testimony, as the national media seized any morsel of news or gossip to sate its ravenous appetite for Ashley Judd stories…
The prosecution was assisted in nearly every article by the same handful of Democratic professionals railing against the prospects of a Judd candidacy, promoting instead the potential Senate candidacy of Kentucky’s young Secretary of State, Alison Lundergan Grimes…
But at least this cast of characters gave their identities, if not their agendas. The most egregious disinformation came from entirely anonymous sources.
Such was the charge that Judd told a group of supporters at a private dinner in Louisville, “I have been raped twice, so I think I can handle Mitch McConnell.” The actress’ apparent flippant comparison of a political campaign to sexual assault spread like Ebola across the Internet, leading some to classify Judd as the Democratic version of Todd Akin.
The problem is, it never happened.
I was at that dinner and never heard her say anything remotely like that.
I’m not sure it really “spread like Ebola” — as noted, Howard Fineman reported it several weeks before anybody really took note of it — but now at least one eyewitness is disputing it.
Did Fineman get it wrong? Where did that quote come from? It might be moot at this point, but if it’s not true, I’d like to know. Just because she has a history of comparing stuff to rape doesn’t mean we should assume this one is “fake but accurate.” Leave that strategy to the Democrats.