Photo via Anthony Bouchard for Congress Against Cheney/Facebook
May 21, 2021, 10:33 am
The Republican’s challenger to Rep. Liz Cheney, who was recently removed from leadership positions for voting to impeach Donald Trump the second time, has not only admitted to the crime of statutory rape at age 18, he compared the horrific story to Romeo and Juliet. In a Facebook Live video that shouts “Senator Bouchard takes on the fake news media,” he confessed to impregnating a girl, who was later found by investigators to be only 14 at the time.
Featured Video
Hide
“So, bottom line, it’s a story when I was young, two teenagers, girl gets pregnant,” said Anthony Bouchard, avoiding mentioning that she was 14 and he was an adult. “You’ve heard those stories before. She was a little younger than me, so it’s like the Romeo and Juliet story.”
Advertisement
Hide
Juliet is not said to get pregnant in the famous Shakespeare play, but additional details make it more like the tragic tale than Bouchard may have intended. The “couple” got married when she was 15 and he was 19, then divorced three years later. At age 20, Bouchard’s ex-wife died by suicide. The House candidate made sure to place the blame on someone else, though.
“She had problems in another relationship. Her dad had committed suicide.”
Bouchard stated that he was confessing to the statutory rape of a 14-year-old because he knew investigators were digging into it, which he referred to as “dirty politics,” and wanted to get ahead of the story. However, if he thought this would make him look better in a political sense or prevent the story from blowing up into a major scandal, he was both wrong and probably shouldn’t have compared it to what many people think of as the peak romance.
Advertisement
Hide
Bouchard further said that he helped to raise his son after the death of his ex-wife, but that they are now basically estranged and the kid is doing things that the candidate doesn’t “approve” of.
“Sadly, he’s made some wrong choices in his life,” he said. “He’s almost become my estranged son. Some of the things that he’s got going on his life, I certainly don’t approve of them. But I’m not going to abandon him. I still love him. Just like when he was born.”
The challenger, who was the first among several to announce that they were running for Cheney’s seat after she voted to impeach, spent the rest of the video railing against political opposition research and trying to make himself out to be the victim of this ugly tale.
“This is really a message about how dirty politics is,” he said, later claiming that the digging into stories like his is “why good people don’t run for office.”
Of course, good people don’t rape 14-year-old girls when they’re adults and then pressure them into child marriages.
Bouchard had been considered the early frontrunner for the race for Cheney’s seat in 2022, getting himself on the conservative cable news racket and raising $334,000 between the time he announced his candidacy a week after the impeachment vote and the end of March. After today, Wyoming Republicans should probably look into the seven other candidates running for the same seat if they really hate Cheney that much.
*First Published: May 21, 2021, 10:33 am
0 Comments