There’s a high chance a lot of these scandals are still fresh in your memory!
Once politicians end up in the office or holding a seat in the Senate, there are a lot of eyes on all their movements. However, this doesn’t mean they aren’t involved in various scandals, some of which could make or break their careers. When whatever they have been doing under the radar gets exposed, the spectacle that follows is one of the things the media focuses on, and not many have lived through their scandals untouched.
From illicit rings to senators who ended up in jail for what they have done, a lot of state officials have been involved in a number of sexual scandals that rocked the nation and shocked the masses. We have gathered some of the most that made these officials lose their status and their dignity through their actions.
Is there any scandal you would like to see featured on the list? Let us know in the comments!
#1 John Ensign
John Ensign managed to take office back in 2001 as a Republican Senator of Nevada. He only lasted about 10 years in office, as back in 2011 the scandal of him having an illicit affair with his assistant’s wife broke. The aide in question, Douglas Hampton, knew about the affair since 2008, but the then-senator pulled some strings with a lobbying firm to keep him from breaking the news. This was illegal, as senators’ aids cannot lobby for a year after leaving their positions.
What’s more, the watchdog group CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) revealed that this affair was just one of the scandalous things Ensign did, which also included harassment of various natures. The affair was broken in 2009, but Ensign did not resign from the Senate until 2011 when it became public.
After the revelation, the Senate’s Special Counsel filed a report on him with the Ethics Committee, detailing a lot of violations he committed in relation to the affair. John Ensign can still be prosecuted at the federal level, so this scandal is far from over.
#2 Jack Ryan
Before Jack Tyan became part of the Republican Party in Illinois, he worked for Golden Sachs at the Chicago branch. He managed to retire when the company went public, as his net worth went up by hundreds of millions. Yet, despite being comfortable, he became intrigued by the vacancy left by outgoing Senator Peter Fitzgerald, who was running in the primaries. He was elected as a candidate for an Illinois Senate seat in 2004, but his dream was never realized.
He was entangled in a divorce battle with his wife, Jeri Ryan, and when the records went public, the scandal broke all of his attempts at winning the seat. They revealed that he was into some very adult kinks, taking his wife with him to specific intimate clubs all over the world, including New York, Paris, and New Orleans. Not really aligning with the virtues of the party. After the scandalous news broke, it took him a week to drop out of the race.
The party had to scramble to find a last-minute candidate to replace him, and their conservative activist Alan Keys did not manage to hold the interest of the masses. He only won 27% of the votes and lost to a then-unknown state senator by the name of Barack Obama.
#3 Kwame Kilpatrick
Kwame Kilpatrick has a long history in politics. First, he won one of the seats in Michigan’s House of Representatives, only to then be elected Mayor of Detroit in 2001, making him the youngest person in the office as he was only 31 years old at the time. While his career was riddled with scandals, two, in particular, stood out in the minds of taxpayers, and they are both s*xual in nature.
The first one was an allegation that he held a stripper party at the mayor’s mansion. His wife allegedly assaulted one of them that night, and another of the dancers was killed a year later with a suspicious weapon, similar to the ones used by the Detroit police.
Nothing was as bad as the scandal broken by the Detroit Free Press back in 2008. The outlet went through thousands of texts, which revealed that he had an affair with Christine Beatty, who was his chief of staff! What’s more, their romantic getaways were all paid for with taxpayer money, as they didn’t pay for anything themselves.
This led to Kilpatrick being charged in court with a slew of charges ranging from misconduct to tax evasion, fraud, perjury, obstruction of justice, assault on a police officer, and embezzlement, just to name a few. There were new criminal charges brought against him later, and in December 2010, he was also indicted on other corruption charges.
He is currently in a federal penitentiary.
#4 Eliot Spitzer
You may remember him as the governor of the State of New York and how other well-known governors, like fellow Democrat Bill Richardson, held him to high standards as “the future of the party.” Yet, it didn’t take long for a scandal to break the rose-tinted glasses on the whole affair, as this one may just be the wildest one yet!
He was inaugurated in January 2007, and he soon started to make a lot of enemies with both state legislators and some powerful figures on Wall Street. This made him lose a lot of support by the time his first year in office was done. The worse was yet to come, as, in March 2008, The New York Times broke the scandal that shook the state!
They broke the story that Spitzer was a patron of an illegal ring that used women for their pleasure, named the Emperor’s Club. This scandal didn’t help his already shaky position in the party, and it took about two weeks before he resigned and was replaced as governor of New York State.
Despite this scandal, he still ended up finding some success as a political commentator and host of the CNN show, In The Arena.
#5 Arnold Schwarzenegger
Who can forget the Austrian bodybuilder who managed to become Mr. Universe at the age of 20? Arnold Schwarzenegger has an impressive life story, especially since he always wanted to be more muscular and worked hard to achieve it. After his title, he went on to pursue Hollywood. And boy was he successful, immortalizing his success with roles in blockbuster movies such as The Terminator, Total Recall, and Commando.
He was once one of the biggest action movie stars in the world, so it is understandable why people were so surprised when he took on his most surprising role. In 2003, he ran for and became governor of California!
However, after an impressive 8 years in office, a scandal broke that tainted the former actor’s name despite the fact that he left office when the scandal came to light. In May 2011, it was announced that he was separating from his wife of 25 years because he had an out-of-wedlock affair with their household staff ten years prior. What surprised the masses, even more, was that he had a child with her!
Despite the scandal, he did not shy away from criticism, yet he had a plea for the tabloids to leave his family out of their lens. Something commendable for someone who had such an affair
#6 Gary Hart
These types of scandals haven’t been contained to a certain party or are only associated with one of them. After all, each party has its own bad apples, and Gary Hart was one of the ones that lived deep within the Democratic Party. Back in 1984, he was the Democratic senator from Colorado, and he ran for president for the first time by running for the Democratic nomination.
He lost to then-Vice President Walter Mondale, who then went on to lose the race to incumbent President Ronald Reagan. This didn’t stop Hart, though, as he was back in April 1987, announcing his candidacy once again! Yet, this time, it wasn’t his opponents that stopped him but rather the scandals that then followed him, which involved a long-standing extramarital affair!
Gary Hart did not run away from the rumors but rather decided to tackle them head-on, even going so far as to provoke newspapers to look into it themselves. He was convinced they would find nothing, and even if the New York Times declined to play his game, the Miami Herald took it as a challenge. Soon enough, a picture of Hart with his mistress (actress Donna Rice) sitting on his lap surfaced in the media.
Needless to say, his expected slot as the frontrunner for the 1988 nominations vanished into thin air. If only he didn’t get so arrogant!
And if you thought that Presidents were above such scandals, think again! Here are the most outrageous affairs that U.S. Presidents had over the course of history!
