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| ‘It became clear to me that there was a culture in Washington that knew about this activity and condoned it by doing nothing about it,’ says Lane Hudson, the gay blogger credited with triggering the scandal that brought about the resignation of former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley. (Photo by J.R. Davis) | |
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LOU CHIBBARO JR.
Nov 8 2006, 9:43 PM |
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The gay blogger who is credited with posting the first set of e-mails that helped ensnare former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) in a sex scandal insists that his motive behind exposing the closeted gay Republican was not partisan politics.
-img-Lane Hudson, 29, a South Carolina native who worked for former Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.) from 1995 to 2002, said he created an anonymous website called Stop Sex Predators in July in an effort to draw attention to what he called Foley’s inappropriate overtures toward teenage pages on Capitol Hill.
“It became clear to me that there was a culture in Washington that knew about this activity and condoned it by doing nothing about it,” he said in an exclusive interview with the Blade this week.
Hudson gave his first public account on how he targeted Foley for exposure, saying he wanted to wait until after Tuesday’s congressional elections before going public. Discussing his action before the election would be misinterpreted as a political ploy rather than a genuine effort to explain his true motivation, he said.
Hudson said he started the Stop Sex Predators blog about two months before he began work in September as a Michigan field organizer for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay political organization.
He said he learned of Foley’s interaction with pages and his frequent e-mail exchanges with them through sources and contacts he declined to disclose.
“I heard more stories about it and just the stories that I heard made it clear to me that it was a long history of his behavior and that it wasn’t isolated incidents,” he said.
He posted messages about other sex scandals, and stated on the blog that his site was dedicated to “exposing sex predators before they can get to our kids.” But he had little to report on Foley until Sept. 21 when he posted messages from someone claiming that Foley was a “danger to any young, slightly attractive young man on The Hill.”
Three days later, on Sept. 24, Hudson posted on his site the e-mails that Foley sent in 2005 to the 16-year-old former page from Louisiana that House GOP leaders later said they learned about through Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.).
Hudson’s posting of those e-mails prompted another, better-known blogger to post the e-mails. That, in turn, prompted ABC News to publish the e-mails on the ABC website. Days later, ABC News received copies of the sexually explicit instant messages between Foley and other former pages. Foley resigned and went into seclusion after ABC News contacted him about the instant messages. The ABC News reports on the messages triggered the scandal that some have said played a role GOP election defeats Tuesday.
Hudson met Foley in ’95
Hudson said his first inkling of Foley’s penchant for young men came through personal experience. Hudson said he met Foley in 1995 at a Washington bar during the time Hudson worked as a student intern at the White House during the Clinton administration. According to Hudson, Foley chatted with him and a few other White House interns at the bar, which Hudson declined to name, and asked for Hudson’s e-mail address. Hudson gave it and Foley soon began an e-mail exchange with him.
“It was nothing explicit, nothing very salacious,” Hudson said of Foley’s e-mails to him.
“I was young and naïve. I didn’t connect the dots,” he said, adding that he never took steps to report Foley’s e-mails as being inappropriate.
He said HRC and the gay-supportive Democratic Party candidates that he campaigned for in Michigan as an HRC field organizer knew nothing about his Stop Sex Predators blog, which Hudson said he created and operated anonymously.
His ties to the blog surfaced publicly in October, shortly after the Foley scandal broke, when someone traced Hudson’s use of his HRC computer to monitor the blog and to occasionally send and receive blog-related e-mail.
Hudson said he confided in his HRC supervisor after learning that someone had linked his blog to the HRC servers. The following day, HRC fired Hudson after determining he violated HRC rules by using the company’s equipment for his personal political endeavors.
“We were operating in an explosive political environment relating to the Foley scandal,” said HRC official David Smith. “Our policy had been violated, and we had no choice,” Smith said. “He was communicating with his blog site on HRC equipment.”
Hudson said he understands HRC’s decision to fire him and doesn’t hold it against the gay rights group.
“If I were in their position, I can’t say that I would not have done the same thing,” he said.
Hudson said he could not have been more pleased when he began work in September for HRC.
‘A predator in Congress’
Hudson said he is especially upset over accusations by conservative and GOP bloggers that he timed his release of the Foley e-mails to orchestrate an “October surprise” to help the Democrats in the election.
“The criticism is moot,” he said. “It only serves to distract from the real issue here. And the real issue is that there was a predator in Congress who, over the course of his 12 years of service, was continuously seeking out pages with unethical, immoral and inappropriate intentions. And now he’s not there,” Hudson said.
“And anyone who wants to say anything different is endorsing the idea that these activities should have continued.”
He points to press accounts indicating that other news organizations, including newspapers in Florida, knew of Foley’s e-mails to the Louisiana page and chose not to report them. He said he became convinced that GOP leaders in the House, who knew of Foley’s inappropriate overtures to pages several years ago, chose not to act because of political repercussions.
“I was mad about it,” he said. “It disappointed me hugely that the gilded halls of Congress, one of the longest, continuously operating governments in the world, allows stuff like this to happen.
“And I wanted to do something about it. Now, I’m also very active politically. And I understood that my actions have political implications. I didn’t know how much it would affect these elections but it’s now clear that it’s affected them quite a bit. And I’m OK with that because politics is a tough game and this could have gone very badly and it didn’t.”
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