Former Rep. Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Alaska, faces accusations from multiple former staff members of having angry outbursts and using derogatory slurs.

Peltola is running against Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) in November’s midterm elections.

The race is considered a toss-up.

More from The New York Times:

Four former staff members said they directly heard her use the word “faggot” over the years, in some cases about her own staff members, an allegation the campaign denied. She also used the word “retarded,” according to former aides and text messages viewed by The New York Times.

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Her demands could be unusual, such as requiring aides to feed live crickets to her family’s pet chameleon, Meatball.

Ms. Peltola’s displays of anger, the extent of which has not been previously reported, have been spilling out into the high-stakes race. This account is based on interviews with nine former staff members, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation and to preserve their professional reputations, as well as dozens of contemporaneous text messages and photos.

The volatility also affected the operations of Ms. Peltola’s congressional office. During her brief tenure in the House, she amassed one of the highest staff turnover rates on Capitol Hill.

Last month, the tensions boiled over after a seemingly minor disagreement, when Ms. Peltola, locked in a competitive bid to oust Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican, fired a handful of longtime staff members just days before the Alaska primary. The campaign downplayed the upheaval at the time, but two of Ms. Peltola’s former aides said it was fueled by one of the candidate’s blowups.

In response to questions from The Times, a spokesman for Ms. Peltola’s campaign denied any pattern of abusive behavior. But the campaign acknowledged that she had sometimes struggled to deal with the grief of losing her mother and her husband over a few months in 2023. Her husband, Eugene, was killed in a plane crash.

“At the time of their passing, Mary was parenting kids through their own grief, serving full-time in the U.S. House of Representatives thousands of miles from home, and running a competitive re-election campaign — all while shouldering the enormous burden of grief,” said campaign spokesman Harry Child, according to Mediaite.

“Like any person who has gone through multiple personal tragedies in the span of a few months, Mary sometimes struggled to deal with her grief,” Child continued.

“Exaggerating and outright lying about moments from the hardest period of her life, and falsely presenting them as a pattern of behavior, is wrong,” he added.

“Mary Peltola does not answer our questions about the NYT report that broke alleging she called staffers a homophobic slur, used the R word and physically pushed a former staffer,” Fox News correspondent Matt Finn said.

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“The NYT story broke just before she took the stage tonight at a Labor event in Anchorage. Peltola told the crowd she has a ‘servants heart.’ Randi Weingarten warmed up the crowd. Peltola’s campaign tells us on-camera its preparing a response,” he added.

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Recent polls in the critical Senate election show Peltola slightly leading Sullivan.

Mediaite shared further:

The Times said former aides described an incident in which Peltola shoved a staffer, a charge the campaign denies. When running for reelection in 2024, Peltola became angered by a Planned Parenthood regional board member’s “scrutiny of her deliberations over how to vote on a defense bill that included anti-abortion policies.”

“I hope Planned Parenthood knows that if we don’t win it’s more their loss than ours. F*** THOSE B******,” Peltola wrote in a text message to her staff in January 2024 that was viewed by the Times.

In another text message, Peltola became irked after a commercial fishing executive posted a photo of them, which caused her trouble because she is opposed to large-scale trawling. In the texts, Peltola referred to the executive as a “r*tard” and said, “I nothing him,” a dismissive expression sometimes heard on the show Scrubs.

Peltola’s campaign acknowledged to the Times that using the word was inappropriate.

“The atmosphere in her office rattled staff members, who were sometimes driven to tears and often discussed quitting,” the paper said. “Some said the mental anguish caused them to lose weight or deal with the stress in therapy.”

 

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