UPDATE, 3:01 p.m. Eastern: Semafor’s Max Tani was able to obtain a statement Thursday afternoon from an Emhoff spokesperson about the Daily Mail’s reporting. In it, they declared that “this report is untrue,” adding “any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false.”
The original post continues below.
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Between Wednesday night and Thursday morning, the major broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC and their liberal cable networks CNN and MSNBC have yet to devote a single second to disturbing new allegations leveled by the Daily Mail against Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff that claim he slapped a then-girlfriend in 2012.
In contrast, NewsNation has had robust coverage with 30 minutes and 50 second on the allegations reported by Daily Mail senior writer Josh Boswell (which made anonymously by three friends of the woman whom Emhoff dated) and the double standard if these claims were made against a Republican. Newsmax was the only other cable network to have touched it with 11 minutes and 29 seconds.
Instead, ABC, CBS, and NBC have combined for 27 minutes (27:08) obsessing over January 6-related matters with the newest filing by Special Counsel Jack Smith against former President Trump and the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign cutting a new ad about what Senator JD Vance (R-OH) said about that day during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.
NewsNation’s flagship AM show Morning in America led the way with a segment in each of its three hours. In the last hour, host Markie Martin interviewed Boswell following this table-setter:
Bombshell allegations out this morning against Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. A new Daily Mail article claiming that the Vice President's husband allegedly slapped an ex-girlfriend in the face back in 2012 while the two waited in a valet line after an event at the Cannes Film Festival in France. Now, NewsNation, of course, did reach out to the Harris campaign to respond to these allegations. So far, we have not heard back.
Martin first had Boswell explain the story behind how he came to this information, but then invited him to lay out what his article alleged took place in May 2012 in Cannes (click “expand”):
BOSWELL: You've got this girlfriend who'd been dating Doug for about three months and she got some tickets to the AMFAR gala, which is, you know, a hugely high-end, A-list celebrity event in – alongside the Cannes Film Festival in May 2012. They go to this event. Everything's going fine. It’s about 3am. They – they leave. This is in the south of France. They’re waiting in line for a taxi and, Jane, the girlfriend, goes up to the valet to – to try and, you know, slip him 100 Euros to get the car faster. Doug sees her put her hand on the valet’s shoulder, thinks that he – that she’s flirting, comes up slaps her in the face so hard that she spun around. That's what the friends were telling me.
MARTIN: Mmmm.
BOSWELL: She then manages to get in – she slaps him back two times. She manages to get into the car, but Doug forces his way in also. She’s scared at that point, friends told me. And so, she immediately called one of them. He's a New York businessman, so he was just getting ready for bed in New York. He gets this call from her. She tells him what happened immediately afterwards and then they go back to hotel. The next day, she – she breaks up with him and Doug apparently is – complete –shows no remorse for the incident. And he instead to give some tennis metaphor. He’s into tennis, right? And he said, oh well, it’s no big deal because you got one across the court and down the line, meaning – a tennis metaphor for slapping him back. So, according to the friends, this suggests that Doug didn’t think slapping a woman was a big deal.
MARTIN: Ah, well, certainly damning, if true.
Martin closed with the other important question here, which is any reaction from either the Harris-Walz campaign or Biden-Harris White House.
On both counts, Boswell said “[w]e've gone to them numerous times and they've not responded at all and I think this is important because the Harris campaign is putting Doug front and center” with a message of “womens safety” being “really on the ballot” and “staff funded by public money.”
Here’s more from Boswell’s article (click “expand”):
DailyMail.com is not naming the woman, who is a successful New York attorney, but will refer to her by the pseudonym 'Jane'.
A second friend said Jane, who had been dating Emhoff for three months, also told her about the alleged violence at the time.
A third friend told DailyMail.com that Jane first told her in 2014 that she had dated Emhoff, and recounted the full story of his alleged abuse in 2018, when then senator Harris was in the news after grilling Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a Senate hearing over sexual assault allegations.
The friends, who all asked not to be named for fear of retaliation by Emhoff, shared with DailyMail.com pictures of him and Jane together from 2012, and other documents and communications corroborating elements of the story.
Jane declined to comment.
(….)
One of Jane's friends, a top New York businessman, said he was at home getting ready for bed that night when he got an unexpected phone call from her.
'It was hard to hear her because she was sobbing,' he said. 'She told me she was with a guy and he hit her.
'It was very clear what she was telling me. She said she was with a guy, her date, she was at the Cannes Film Festival, and he hit her. She was in the car with the guy at the time.
'I didn't know what to do, I didn't know whether to call the French police. I couldn't get a hold of her after calling back.'
He said he still had a 'vivid' memory of the troubling conversation from 12 years ago.
'In later conversations, but pretty contemporaneous with that, she told me more about the guy,' he added.
Going back to the beginning of the interview, Martin asked how this story came to his attention. Boswell revealed this story took “[s]everal weeks” to pin down and vet, but “grew out of” his previous blockbuster story about Emhoff from August in which he was the first to reveal the Second Gentleman’s first marriage fell apart following an affair with the nanny and elementary school teacher of his daughters.
In addition, he got the nanny pregnant, but the child did not survive.
While naysayers may dismiss the Daily Mail outright, Boswell noted Emhoff himself confirmed the affair only hours after publication.
After explaining his investigation turned him “documentary evidence – messages, photographs, emails that help[ed] back up” the verbal claims from his sources, Boswell answered Martin’s question about the timing of the story so close to the election.
“[T]he thing that really sparked coming forward was seeing the Harris campaign present Doug Emhoff as this feminist ally. And that's what really got that backs up…[One] of the friends…finds it kind of, you know, disgusting was the word she used that they are presenting him as a feminist when, in fact, they say that, you know, he has this abusive background,” he replied.
After Boswell’s retelling of the events in question he chronicled in his article and the lack of responses from both the campaign and White House, Martin tossed to a portion of a lengthy segment on Chris Cuomo’s show Wednesday night in which he invited Bill O’Reilly and Stephen A. Smith to weigh in.
She noted that while they think it “may not impact the election,” this story “speaks to a larger issue in media coverage.”
To see the relevant transcript from NewsNation’s Morning in America from October 3, click here.
