Does The Ted Cruz Affairs Scandal Have Any Truth To It?
Even if you loathe the Republican hopeful, taking the Ted Cruz affairs scandal with a grain of salt seems like a necessary precaution given the state of the 2016 election cycle.
For anyone late to the scandal, last week National Enquirer published an article that accused Ted of having at least five mistresses. The Cruz affair story took off in the press, and was even reprinted by major news sites. The tabloid itself used all anonymous sources — so-called “Washington insiders” — to prove the Texas senator’s infidelity.
“Private detectives are digging into at least five affairs Ted Cruz supposedly had. The leaked details are an attempt to destroy what’s left of his White House campaign!”
First of all, one must consider the source of the scandal. National Enquirer is hardly known as a political news source of confidence, but Ted’s affairs aren’t the first ones to appear in its tabloid pages either. In 2007, the magazine broke the story of John Edwards’ mistress Rielle Hunter, which was largely ignored by the rest of the mainstream press at the time.
The end result of John’s situation doesn’t bode well for Cruz if he has actually been unfaithful. After running on a vice-presidential ticket, Edwards’ career in politics was decimated when the Enquirer story turned out to be true. Not only had he cheated on his wife while she was battling cancer, but he fathered a child with the woman and sought to cover it up by faking DNA results afterward. If Ted has any skeletons in his closet, they will soon be coming to light.
Of course, there’s an outside element in the potential Cruz scandal that Edwards wasn’t battling: Donald Trump. Salon reported that Donald is quite cozy with National Enquirer CEO David Pecker. Incidentally, all of Trump’s major rivals have faced smear articles from the tabloid. Ted isn’t even the first one to be accused of having affairs. “‘Family Man’ Marco Rubio’s Love Child Stunner” and “Governor Mike Huckabee and the Hooker” are just two of the headlines run by the Enquirer this election cycle. In other news: Ben Carson left a sponge in a patient’s brain and Jeb Bush snorted cocaine when George H.W. Bush won election.
Some of Cruz’s responses to the scandal have left others less convinced of his fidelity. Soon after the article about Ted’s affairs broke, The Daily Mail pestered him for a clear rejection of having cheated on his wife. Some media was suspicious of his response attacking the National Enquirer instead of outright denying sleeping with someone other than Heidi Cruz.
“It is total lies, it was planted by Trump’s henchmen, and I don’t think the people of Wisconsin or the people of America have any interest in tabloid trash.”
It’s not just Ted’s campaign that has come out in his defense. Amanda Carpenter, a former Cruz aide, was named in the original story as one of the women with whom the Republican hopeful had strayed from his wife. On Tuesday, she appeared on Jake Tapper’s CNN program to staunchly reject that any such affair ever took place, and also blamed Donald for the slanderous story.
“I was one of five women that was just chosen at random, it seems, by National Enquirer… I’m stuck in this box, where I am forced to try to defend every smear that comes after me, my husband, my children online or suffer in silence. And so I just want to encourage everyone to look at the broader context of this campaign. There’s a toxic culture being produced this season. And I think we all need to recognize what’s happening, look at the facts, and go into this with our eyes wide open and be unafraid to confront it.”
Despite Donald Trump’s obvious hand in the release of the Ted Cruz affairs scandal, he actually wasn’t the only GOP candidate to touch on the accusations. The Daily Beast reported that his detractors have been pushing for the story to come to the surface for months, peddling it to major news sources like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
[Image via Sean Rayford/Getty Images]
