The woman who has accused Kentucky Agricultural Commissioner James Comer of inflicting physical and emotional abuse on her while they dated more than 20 years ago posted a letter detailing her allegations on Facebook Friday.
Marilyn Thomas, the college ex-girlfriend of Comer (pictured), earlier in the week sent a four-page letter to the Louisville Courier-Journal with her accusations against Comer. The newspaper’s story Monday roiled the GOP primary for governor and was featured in a candidate’s debate Wednesday.
Thomas now appears to have posted the same (or substantially similar) letter to her personal Facebook page. The Kentucky newspaper did not release the full letter.
“Did Jamie Comer ever hit me? Yes,” Thomas, who dated Comer at Western Kentucky University in the early 1990s, wrote in the Facebook post. Thomas also claimed in the Facebook post that Comer drove her to an abortion clinic in college.
Comer has denied Thomas’ allegations both directly and through counsel, who has threatened to sue the Louisville paper for publishing her allegations.
In her Facebook post, Thomas prefaces the letter with an extended description of her motives for going public, the pressure she was under to go public, and how it feels to “expose my deepest and most private secrets”:
This is already out on several sites but I’m going ahead and posting here, mainly for my friends and family in Kentucky. This is what I was forced to do. It’s a bit of a rambling stream of consciousness that hopefully conveys my desperate desire to stay away from everything that is happening to me now. I can’t wrap my head around being victimized twice but I’m four days into it so, I’m trying to not drown in my new reality. Horrible things have been said about me. I’m taking punches from everywhere. At the core of it is still this sad letter that I felt forced to write. Maybe I don’t get it after all. Everything seems upside down because I was pressured to expose my deepest and most private secrets. I know that “dying a thousand deaths” is just a line from literature. But I physically feel like my life is imitating that art. I guess I just want the people who care about me to know everything. The strangers and the political machines don’t matter. I just want the genuine people in my life to still be there when the storm is over. I know most of you will be and the support has helped me stand up and breathe every morning.
Read the full post here.
Since the letter was first reported on by the Courier-Journal on Monday, Comer has been dogged by questions about Thomas’ claims, which he’s flatly denied. Comer has suggested that rival Republican candidate Hal Heiner offered Thomas money to make the accusations. Thomas, in response, has challenged Comer to take a lie detector test. A lawyer for Comer has vowed a “devastating lawsuit” against the Courier-Journal.
The primary election is less than two weeks away.
On Wednesday, during a GOP gubernatorial debate, Matt Bevin, the former tea party challenge to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Comer both said Heiner had been playing dirty in the primary. On Friday Bevin released a new campaign ad “food fight” making fun of Heiner and Comer bickering in the primary.
