Dem Candidate In Arizona: My Rape Was Not A ‘Hoax’ Concocted for Votes

Bernadette Greene-Placentia would like you to know the story of her rape is not an “October Surprise.” 

She did not conspire with the media to publish the graphic details of her sexual assault on the same day early voting ballots were sent out to voters in Arizona. Her harrowing account of being bludgeoned and violated by two men in the middle of the night in a suburban parking lot is not a “hoax” she concocted to win over voters’ sympathies. Her fragmented memories of the attack, and her initial reluctance to go to authorities, are not evidence of an elaborate lie, nor of a nefarious Democratic plot to wrest control of Congress, as some right-wing influencers have suggested. It was hard enough coming forward to say she was raped, she told TPM. Now she has to contend with all these men, with millions of followers online, loudly asserting that maybe she wasn’t. She can’t help but remember that these men publicly trying to poke holes in her story have mothers. “Is this really how you were raised?” she wants to ask them.

“I’m not gonna lie, my world kind of exploded a week ago,” Greene-Placentia told TPM in an interview last week. The 52-year-old former long-haul trucker is the Democratic nominee for Congress in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District — a conservative part of suburban Phoenix where the Republican incumbent, Rep. Abe Hamadeh, is expected to win re-election. 

The national press hadn’t paid the race much attention until October 7, when the Phoenix New Times published an article with the headline: “Congressional candidate is raped while repairing her campaign signs.” The story, based on an interview with Greene-Placentia, was immediately picked up by mainstream, national media outlets, and just as quickly by right-wing influencers, who started dissecting her story, alleging various discrepancies and accusing her of fabricating an allegation of rape for some kind of political gain. After a couple days of watching these conspiracy theories flourish, she decided to stop looking at social media. Her husband was beside himself with anger, she said. Her 21-year-old daughter kept crying. 

Most of the influencers seized on one particular detail in Greene-Placentia’s retelling of her rape: that she believes one of her assailants might’ve called her a “Democratic bitch” during the assault, rendering it a potentially politicaly-motivated crime during one of the most contentious midterm election cycles in recent memory. “This is the biggest load of crap I’ve ever read,” Walter Curt, an Ohio-based MAGA activist and blogger with a large social media following, wrote on X about Greene-Placentia’s allegations. “…I’m sure they yelled ‘this is MAGA country’ too. Jussie Smollett level bullsh*t.” ‘

A lot of men were making the comparison to Smollett, the actor who staged a hate crime against himself in 2019 and falsely claimed one of his assailants screamed, “This is MAGA country!” 

“A Democrat Jussie Smollett in AZ?!” was the title of a segment on the October 8 episode of the Charlie Kirk Show. The show, which has nearly 6 million subscribers on YouTube and another 2 million on Rumble, is hosted by Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff, MAGA operatives and friends of Kirk who took over the podcast after the eponymous host was assassinated in 2025. Kolvet is a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, the massive right-wing political organization, founded by Kirk, with over 1,500 chapters at colleges across the country. Neff, as a Politico profile recently detailed, is one of the most influential conservatives in America. He served as the lead writer for “Tucker Carlson Tonight” when Carlson was at Fox News. Neff resigned from the network after racist and misogynistic posts he wrote online under a pseudonym were unearthed by CNN, and was later hired by Kirk at TPUSA, becoming one of his top lieutenants and helping Kirk become a household name.

“Because she waited two weeks to go to the police, it means she never went to the hospital,” Neff said of Greene-Placentia during the 15 minutes he and Kolvet devoted to picking apart her story during an episode of the Charlie Kirk Show on Oct. 8. “She washed her clothing. She never received a sexual assault kit test that could have gotten DNA evidence of these attackers. She doesn’t remember where it happened. She has a street intersection, but it’s only in that area…”  

“It’s so cinematic the way that she paints it,” Kolvet observed, “like, perhaps too cinematic. And the fact that, conveniently, there’s zero way to check any of this. The video surveillance is probably erased.” 

The two men repeatedly suggested that Greene-Placentia was orchestrating a “hoax” and a political “hail mary” in order to win a seat in Congress next month and help secure the House for Democrats. 

“We might have a one-seat majority in the House either way at the end of this,” Kolvet said. 

“With a hoaxer!” Neff replied.

The two men offered the occasional caveat that if new evidence emerges “proving” the rape happened as Greene-Placentia described it, then the Democratic candidate deserves “sympathy,” and those responsible should face harsh penalties. But even in the case she was raped, the pair argued, her actions afterwards amounted to a moral failing and demonstrated a lack of intelligence in a way that was disqualifying for public office, in their view. 

“‘She either made it up or had the best night of her life,” Neff said at one point, reading out an online comment from one of the show’s viewers. “‘If she was too stupid to go to ER and do a rape kit, she’s too dumb to be in Congress,’” went another he read. Neff shrugged at the comment, in a way that suggested he thought it was a valid observation. 

“Candidly,” Kolvet said, “that’s the point I made to Blake on the phone this morning. Like, if this really happens, you have an obligation, go to the police, get checked, and is that challenging? Yes, but it is a moral obligation you have if this really happened.”

Greene-Placentia told the Phoenix New Times that she’d gone out at 2 a.m. on a Friday in late August to fix campaign signs in Sun City. It was a routine errand, something she liked to do at night to beat the heat and avoid traffic. She occasionally brought her husband or a campaign staffer with her, according to the Phoenix New Times. She’d never felt unsafe before. This time, however, as she walked across a parking lot, something smashed into her head and everything went black. 

When she came to, a man was on top her, raping her, she said. When it was over, she told the paper, she remembers him muttering something like “-ic bitch, not a very good fuck.” She’s not sure of the exact phrasing, but remembers thinking he might’ve said “Democratic bitch.” 

Then she said she felt another man begin to nudge her legs open. She swung at him with her left leg, prompting him to say “not even worth it,” she told the paper. There are parts of the attack she doesn’t remember, and others she said she recalls in vivid detail. She can still see the second man’s small feet, and the black boots he wore. The men left her face-down on the pavement. “The hatch of her silver Jeep Grand Cherokee was still open,” the Phoenix New Times wrote. “The car was still running. She heard music.” 

Things get foggier from there. She doesn’t remember driving home and falling into bed. “It’s just these little tiny flashes of things that I do remember,” she told the Phoenix New Times. “As much as I don’t want to remember, I’ve tried very, very hard to remember more stuff. But that’s where I’m at.”

She disappeared from her friends and family for about two days, finally breaking down to her campaign staff, telling them the story, she confirmed to TPM. She told her husband the next day, and the police two weeks later. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s office is investigating. 

“Having a hazy understanding or memory of what happened is very typical, and shouldn’t be construed as deception,” Kamila Alexander, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, told TPM about incidents of sexual assault. 

Research has shown that traumatic events can scramble the way memories are stored, often as a result of the brain prioritizing survival over memory. It’s common for survivors of sexual assault to remember certain, small details of the attack in vivid detail, while seemingly more important details — like the exact location or time — are lost. 

“So when people hear the survivor’s story changed slightly over time, or they hear someone saying that they don’t remember exactly what’s actually happened, it’s really consistent with what the science says about how trauma affects brain networks, and it’s not a sign that someone’s lying or fabricating the story,” Alexander told TPM.  

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, incidents of women falsely reporting rape are exceedingly rare, while it is exceedingly common for women to not report their rape to police at all — only 25 percent of women do so. Even those who do can take significant time to do so. This reticence, Alexander said, is understandable. Going to law enforcement can be a traumatic event. Women have to undergo “often humiliating examinations that can feel like an additional violation of your body,” she said. They are asked to tell their stories “over and over again” by less-than-sensitive police officers who might not be trained in dealing with sexual assault, picking apart their stories for inconsistencies. Moreover, Alexander said, there is a “very strong history of survivors not being believed.” 

Among the right-wing accounts on X that cast doubt on Greene-Placentia’s story of rape was Law Enforcement Today, a far-right news outlet written by and for police officers, with a wide readership across America. “Jussie Smollet 2.0? Or an as$ault that needs to be prosecuted?….” Law Enforcement today posited on X on Oct. 12 to its 60,000 followers. “We aren’t saying this didn’t happen. We believe women. Just not ALL women, and not without any evidence.” 

Greene-Placentia recalls feeling deeply “embarrassed” about her rape, she told TPM. That she washed the clothes she wore that night; that she didn’t photograph her bruises; that she didn’t immediately go to the hospital for a rape kit; and that she can’t remember the exact physical location of her assault — these details aren’t evidence of a cover-up, she said, but of a woman struggling to come to terms with what she’d experienced. 

She feels “guilty,” she said, thinking back to the the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, when Christine Blasey-Ford testified that Kavanaugh raped her when they were in high school. Blasey-Ford’s memories of the alleged assault were scattered too — she also couldn’t remember getting home — and it took her years to come forward with the allegation, which Kavanaugh denied. “I was one of those people who was like, ‘Why didn’t she say something?’” Greene-Placentia said. 

Now she knows. Ultimately, she decided to go to police — and to go public — with her story because she felt like a hypocrite, insisting on the campaign trail that she would fight for Arizonans in Congress, while not fighting for herself and other survivors. 

“I had no control when the story was gonna drop,” she said of the Phoenix New Times article, brushing aside Neff’s absurd suggestion on the Charlie Kirk Show that revelations of her rape were timed to coincide with the release of early voting ballots in Arizona. She knew she’d receive a little “incoming fire” after the story went public, she told TPM, but was still blown away by the intensity of the hatred online. 

“She got raped by an illegal alien. That’s why the story is so vague; sick bitch won’t put him on blast because he’s a sainted minority and doesn’t want him deported,” Matt Forney, a far-right influencer, said on X. 

“It was consensual then,” replied Aidan Thompson, who commands half a million followers from his America First account on X. “She knew she was inviting a rapist into the country.” 

“At some point we have to admit a lot of liberal woman want to be raped,” Forney wrote back. 

Still, there were messages of support. “Nobody should ever face violence like that,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) said in a statement, adding: “It took real courage for Bernadette to speak publicly about something so painful.” Rep. Greg Stanton (D-AZ) said “no one should ever be subjected to this kind of violence — especially while engaging in the democratic process.” 

Not every message of support, however, felt genuine to Greene-Placentia. Her Republican opponent, Hamadeh, issued a statement calling “upon authorities to investigate these serious allegations thoroughly, including finding all possible camera footage of the time and place in order to prosecute the crime to the fullest extent of the law.” 

But earlier this year Hamadeh publicly defended Tristan and Andrew Tate, the “manosphere” influencers arrested in Florida and extradited to the UK to face 59 charges for rape, assault, sex trafficking, and indecent images of children, among other crimes. “The Tate brothers are American citizens and so they deserve full American Constitutional protections — which means innocent until proven guilty,” Hamadeh wrote on X after their arrest in July. “No American court has charged them with a crime despite years of false alarms and innuendos. They’ve been deplatformed, debanked, arrested, and still no convictions — something President Trump has endured for years.” 

Asked about Hamadeh’s statement of support for her, Greene-Placentia was blunt. “It don’t mean jack shit,” she said.  

“It’s easy to draft a statement of support,” she explained, but Hamadeh’s support of the Tate brothers, and his vote in Congress against releasing the Epstein files — DOJ records detailing allegations of the serial sexual abuse of financier Jeffrey Epstein — makes such a statement ring “pretty hollow.” 

Hamadeh’s campaign didn’t respond to a TPM request for comment. 

During the episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, in which co-hosts Neff and Kolvet cast doubt on Greene-Placentia’s rape, Kolvet called Hamadeh a “friend of the show.” 

The hosts also compared the story of her rape to “Jane Doe,” the Cornell University student who, in a recent lawsuit, accused seven fraternity brothers of sexual assault during a 2024 party. When Jane Doe filed the suit against her alleged assailants — all of whom deny the accusations — in September, right-wing online influencers unleashed a torrent of abuse, doxxing and threatening her. A recent New York Times story revealed that Jane Doe’s family was “swatted” this month, with an anonymous caller falsely reporting a murder at their home, prompting police to arrive with guns drawn, demanding they drop to the ground. 

“We got the Cornell case also happening, which I’m going to call a hoax — because that girl was absolutely consensual, and we’ve got to stop treating women like little children,” Kolvet said. “I’m sorry, women. You’re an adult with the equal rights of citizenship. You have agency. The responsibility is yours to not take drugs, to not get drunk, to not go be out at 2 a.m. alone on a street, if that’s really what happened…” 

Greene-Placentia is still having trouble wrapping her head around the doubt and vitriol that’s been thrown at her. Best she can understand it, these influencers are so steeped in “hyperpartisanship” that they can’t recognize the humans on the other side of their attacks. “They’re looking for any reasons to discredit anybody from the other side,” she said. 

“That’s not being a good human, frankly,” she said. 

As disheartening as the whole experience has been, she’s also received hundreds of messages of support from women across the country, sharing stories of their own rapes, she told TPM. Many of these women, Greene-Placentia said, never came forward with their stories out of fear. They thanked her for coming forward with hers. 

It’s been a dizzying experience for Greene-Placentia. She feels guilty for not knowing that one in five women in America will experience sexual assault, and sad such an experience is so prevalent. She feels a profound empathy for their experiences now, having acquired an awful, intimate understanding why so many are afraid to speak out, she said. And she feels strangely heartened — that for all the ghouls talking about her online — there are so many women out there who get it. She knows she’s not alone. She’s not crazy. 

“I would encourage every woman to come forward,” Greene-Placentia said. “Please let your family and friends know. Reach out to my campaign. I will answer the phone.” 

“I will say,” she added, “that by talking about it, for all the incoming fire as me and my family have faced, there is something empowering being able to say, ‘that was a temporary situation where someone robbed me of my autonomy and this is me taking it back.’” 

She had a message for all the women out there struggling with the decision to step forward. 

“You will be believed,” she said.