(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The Daily Mail published an exclusive story Friday, resurfacing allegations that GOP presidential candidate and virulent neocon Nikki Haley had multiple affairs before she became governor of South Carolina.
The allegations that Haley cheated on her husband were made by two of her alleged ex-lovers, Will Folks and Larry Marchant, who both outlined their allegations in affidavits in 2010. Haley’s alleged affairs were reported on at the time, but the Daily Mail’s Friday exclusive marked the first time the affidavits were published by a major media outlet.
According to Folks’s affidavit, he and Haley “engaged in an inappropriate physical relationship that included numerous instances of inappropriate sexual contact.”
“Representative Haley and I shared our first kiss while sitting in her parked car outside of MacDougal’s restaurant and bar in downtown Columbia, SC,” Folks wrote in the October 2010 affidavit.
“This kiss took place in early 2007 following an evening with friends at the nearby Liberty Taproom. After this first kiss, Rep. Haley drove us to the parking lot behind the neighborhood center at Emily Douglas Park where we parked for approximately forty-five minutes. There we slid back the seats of her Cadillac SUV so that Rep. Haley could climb on top of me,” he added.
Marchant’s affidavit said he had dinner, drinks and sex with Haley in her hotel room at a Salt Lake City conference in June 2008.
“After a night together of dinner and drinks with other participants of the conference, Rep. Haley and I returned to the hotel together. We went back to her room where we had sexual intercourse and I spent the remainder of the evening. I left her room at approximately 6:00 am,” Marchant said.
“I came forward publicly on this matter only after being contacted by the press and after hearing Rep. Haley claim that she had been One Hundred Percent faithful to her husband in response to the Folk’s allegations when I knew her statements were absolutely false.”
As for the Daily Mail’s new witnesses—identified by the outlet only as “multiple GOP insiders”—they said Haley’s affairs were an open secret.
One South Carolina GOP insider told the Daily Mail they knew about Haley’s alleged affair with Marchant at the time.
“She was in [Marchant’s] office all the time, she’d be there at 11 or midnight, the two of them would be drinking,” the former associate of Haley reportedly said.
Another witness, one of Haley’s former campaign staffers, told the Daily Mail he had no doubt about the nature of her relationship with Folks and Marchant.
“When she was having the affairs, she and her husband were having a lot of problems and were on the verge of divorce,” the ex-staffer reportedly said. “There’s no question she and Will were having an affair.”
The Daily Mail claimed to have four sources in total who corroborated allegations of Haley’s infidelity.
Haley has denied having the affairs in the past, but she reportedly didn’t respond to requests for comment before the Daily Mail published its scoop.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
