Paging Keith Olbermann. You can call off the search…we’ve found your Worst Person in the World for tonight.
Meet Tennessee state senator Paul Stanley. He’s a solid conservative Republican and married father of two, who according to his website is “a member of Christ United Methodist Church, where he serves as a Sunday school teacher and board member of their day school.” (Check out the religious imagery on the site — the sun poking through clouds, as if manifesting God’s presence — which of course shows Stanley’s deeply pious nature.)
Stanley recently sponsored a bill designed to prevent gay couples from adopting children. And when a Planned Parenthood official recently sought his support for family planning services for Memphis teens, Stanley told her, according to the official, that he “didn’t believe young people should have sex before marriage anyway, that his faith and church are important to him, and he wants to promote abstinence.”
So far, so far Republican. But you can see where this is going…
In a sworn affidavit, a Tennessee state investigator has said that Stanley admitted to having a “sexual relationship” with a 22-year-old female intern working in his office, and to taking nude pictures of her in “provocative poses” in his apartment.
Things started to unravel for Stanley, it seems, in April, when he received a text message reading:
Good morning sir, how are you this fine day? McKensie and I have been talking and I feel that I have a video and some pictures you might be interested in seeing. This is her boyfriend, that guy you met outside Walgreens.
That was the start of an effort by the girl’s boyfriend to blackmail Stanley, which ultimately led to Stanley going to the cops. The boyfriend is now charged with trying to extort $10,000 from Stanley.
Oh, bonus! Stanley works as a financial adviser for the Stanford Financial Group, whose founder, Allen Stanford, has been charged with orchestrating an $8 billion scam.
Wonder if Stanley stays at C Street when he’s in DC.
Late Update: It gets worse. In 1994, Stanley’s first wife, Judy Martin, filed for a restraining order against him, charging that he had physically assaulted her three times. She wrote: “He was going out the door to leave our house and he hit me with a tremendous blow and then he proceeded to turn and run away from me outside the garage to the street.” Stanley and Martin divorced the following year.
According to the Nashville Post, Stanley met his current wife, Kristi Stanley, soon afterwards, while both were working for Bill Frist’s U.S. Senate office in Memphis. She was working as — an intern.
