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| Did Kentucky Senate hopeful Rand Paul tie a college girl up and try to force her to take bong hits? |
A new article profiling Kentucky Republican Senate hopeful Rand Paul’s college days makes the allegation that Paul and a friend once kidnapped a classmate and tried to force her to smoke marijuana.
The GQ Magazine article by Jason Zengerle relates the anecdote about Tea Party darling Paul and another alleged member of the “NoZe Brotherhood,” a “secret society” described as “a refuge for atypical Baylor students,” reports Stephanie Condon at CBS News.
The unnamed woman, reportedly a college classmate of Paul’s, requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, according to GQ. She told Zengerle about the incident, which allegedly occurred in 1983:
“He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.” After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. “They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him,” the woman recalls. “They blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’
“They never hurt me, they never did anything wrong, but the whole thing was kind of sadistic,” the woman said. “They were messing with my mind. It was some kind of joke.”
“I’ll bet they were listening to Rush,” wise-cracked Joshua Green of The Atlantic.
Green, after recently tweeting about Paul’s seemingly unusual affinity for the Canadian power trio, was quickly schooled by legions of Twitter users that Rush are well-known libertarians, and that the trio’s album 2112 is actually an homage to fellow libertarian and pseudo-intellectual Ayn Rand — “which made the whole thing even stranger and funnier,” according to Green.
“During his time at Baylor, Dr. Paul competed on the swim team and was an active member of Young Conservatives of Texas,” Paul campaign manager Jesse Benton non-responded when asked by Zengerle if Paul remembered the incident.
Benton repeated his non-denial to Politico reporter Ben Smith. “We’ll leave National Enquirer-type stories about his teenager years to the tabloids where they belong,” Benton emailed Smith.
Benton was considerably more direct when speaking to Slate.
“We are investigating all our options — including legal ones,” Benton said. “We will not tolerate drive-by journalism by a writer with a leftist agenda.”
The story breaks just a week after the somewhat fact-challenged Paul campaign was forced to “clarify” that the candidate never actually graduated from Baylor, reports Ray Gustini at the Atlantic Wire.
