Owner of gym where MTG once worked as a coach said she had "multiple, blatant extramarital affairs" [View all]

[highplainsdem]

despite her claims to represent Christian values.

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New Yorker article and excerpt:


https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/how-the-qanon-candidate-marjorie-taylor-greene-reached-the-doorstep-of-congress

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One of the people who encouraged Cowan to run was Ansley Saville, a retired public-relations professional who has long been active in local politics. After the primary results had set up a showdown between Cowan and Greene, a friend of Saville’s sent her screenshots of social-media posts written by the former owner of a CrossFit gym where, in 2012, Greene had begun to work, part time, as a coach. CrossFit is a fitness regimen famous for inspiring intense devotion; when the former gym owner, Jim Chambers, first met Greene, he got the sense that it “had kind of taken her life over,” he told me. “She had a lot of time and a lot of money,” he said, and also a vague ambition, as he saw it, “to run a gym.” When, eight years later, it looked like she might be headed to Congress, Chambers got on social media and told the world that, back when he knew Greene, she was having “multiple, blatant extramarital affairs in front of all of us.” He added, “I don’t even judge that, until you say the kind of shit she does and claim the Jesus about it.” (Greene, who was baptized at an evangelical church in a suburb just north of Atlanta, in 2011, and speaks frequently about being Christian, has said that she wants to bring “my faith and my family values to Washington.”)

I spoke to one of the men with whom Greene allegedly had an affair. He asked not to be named and told me that he, too, was bothered by Greene’s hypocrisy. He provided me with a screenshot of a text exchange in which Greene acknowledged sleeping with him. “She never talked about politics,” he said. He told me he later learned that she was also sleeping with another man who was not her husband, “while the whole time being ‘super Christian.’ ” He added, “She’s not the pro-family, pro-Christian, strong-business woman she touts herself to be.”

Chambers has described himself, politically, as “somewhere between an eco-anarchist and a Marxist-Leninist”; in a Facebook post about Greene’s alleged affairs, he noted that he did not support “her republican primary opponent, any democrat, or anyone in the bourgeois electoral trap.” (His grandmother Anne Cox Chambers was a billionaire and a major donor to the Democratic Party.) Chambers told me that his politics didn’t seem to bother Greene when he knew her. Ansley Saville told me that, after she forwarded Chambers’s posts to friends, “it got back to Mrs. Greene,” who then, she said, left her a voice mail to the effect of “If I were you, I wouldn’t want my community to know that I had anything to do with Antifa”—an apparent reference to Chambers, who earned some local notoriety a few years ago after posting a sign on his gym saying that cops and active military were not welcome as members. Saville said that she also received direct messages from Justin Kelley, a Greene staffer who often attends campaign events with a firearm tucked beneath his belt, and who, last year, completed felony probation for stealing thousands of hydrocodone tablets from a pharmacy where he worked, in 2013.

When I asked Greene about the alleged affair, she replied by texting me a series of screenshots from Chambers’s social-media accounts, including a photo of the sign he put up on his gym. “Let me be clear with you,” Greene texted. “Writing defamatory articles about me is a very bad choice. Be very wise in who your ‘sources’ are.” She also directed me to her attorney, L. Lin Wood, who has lately been suggesting, on Twitter, that Trump’s political opponents deliberately infected the President with the novel coronavirus. When sent a series of claims and allegations about Greene that are addressed in this piece, Wood responded by insisting that the piece was “intended to smear her with false accusations, half-truths, misrepresentations, out-of-context statements, and agenda driven lies”—but, like Greene, he did not specifically refute or deny any of the particular allegations or claims presented to him.

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