Ohio GOP loose with facts on Sherrod Brown

LDarrel Rowland

ike president, like party chair?

Jane Timken, head of the Ohio GOP, made this assertion in her weekly email this past Sunday:

“Sherrod Brown was confronted with his past domestic abuse last week, but Ohio media were quick to sweep it under the rug. Sherrod Brown has never had to answer questions about his court-documented domestic abuse, and in the era of the MeToo movement, this is unacceptable.”

Never? Not once in the 32 years since Ohio’s senior senator and his first wife went through a nasty divorce?

In a time when a U.S. Supreme Court nominee’s actions from high school are being questioned, that’s a pretty damning indictment. It’s also not true.

“I have done nothing wrong,” Brown told The Dispatch in April 1989, after an alleged altercation stemming from the divorce.

More to the point, at the same time, Brown also said, “I’ve never hurt her. I’ve never touched her. I never harassed her on the phone.”

In Brown’s first campaign after the divorce, future Gov. Bob Taft refused to use the material in his campaign for secretary of state, when he became the only person to hand Brown a defeat at the ballot box. Taft was “squeamish” about using the material, aide Bob Clegg remembers, and Clegg said he didn’t think it would work politically.

By the time Brown ran for Congress in 1992, his former wife, Larke Ummel Recchie, said, “Divorce can often be an unfriendly ordeal, and ours was no exception. There was a lot of hurt on both sides, and it led only to angry words.”

Brown’s former wife cut an ad for him in his first Senate campaign in 2006, and she and her current husband have held fundraisers for Brown in his 2012 and 2018 re-election campaigns. She labels the GOP’s current effort “disgusting” and said in a statement about Brown, “Anyone who suggests he is not an honorable man is just wrong.”

For some in the Ohio GOP, that’s not good enough. They want Brown’s ex-wife to either say the allegations of abuse in her 1986 court filings are true, or admit she lied. The purported relevance of the allegations this year is linked by Republicans to the #MeToo movement. When Republicans brought them up in Brown’s 2012 campaign, the stated relevance was his support of the Violence Against Women Act.

Timken and other GOP officials were critical of The Dispatch and other media for pointing out that a group calling itself MeTooOhio that resurrected the old allegations this month actually is based in a GOP office outside of Washington. D.C., used a firm with GOP connections to prepare the ad, and employed as a spokeswoman a GOP operative from Georgia who had worked for the presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas.

After these revelations, the group tapped a Trump acolyte in Ohio who lost a Republican congressional primary to speak for the group, which demanded that Brown resign immediately.

And now, OhioFirst, a political-action committee that has donated money to Brown’s opponent in the current U.S. Senate race, GOP Congressman Jim Renacci, is citing MeTooOhio in a fundraising appeal.

But Alice Stewart, the Virginia-based spokeswoman for MeTooOhio, said, “OhioFirst is an independent effort and is not coordinated with the Renacci campaign. MeTooOhio is also independent and not affiliated with the Renacci campaign. There is absolutely nothing inappropriate about Ohio First and MeTooOhio coordinating.”

Just one?

The Republican Governors Association took to the airwaves last week in a bid to boost the candidacy of Attorney General Mike DeWine.

The RGA rolled out a new TV commercial that says Democrat Richard Cordray “failed to protect rape victims” when he was attorney general.

The spot focuses on the DNA testing of rape kits that had languished untested at police agencies across the state.

But the RGA ad makers didn’t do DeWine a favor with a graphic, superimposed over DeWine talking to lab-coat wearing technicians, that read: “Mike DeWine — Put Rapist Behind Bars.”

DeWine says the testing of rape kits has led to hundreds of arrests and convictions — not just one.