Republican candidate for Congress Alek Skarlatos has some explaining to do. He's in a competitive Oregon district, so he might have thrown the race to his Democratic opponent over the scandal he's found himself in.
Either that, or Republicans will nominate him to run for President after it was discovered that he repeatedly "liked" photos of underage girls in bikinis on Instagram and joked about strangling women on a podcast shortly before beginning his political career four years ago. I'm sure QAnon will be all over this, right?
Skarlatos' comments about choking women were on a podcast in 2018, and they were talking about celebrities' sex lives.
Via the Oregon Capital Chronicle:
"You ever thought if you choked someone and killed them in bed what would happen?" podcast host Ross Patterson asked.
"Oh yeah," Skarlatos responded, laughing. "Oh yeah."
The conversation about women dying during sex continued, with Stone saying he had plans to sit in on a trial of a man charged with choking his girlfriend to death during what the defendant described as a consensual encounter. Skarlatos then referred to a 2017 Florida case in which a man argued that his girlfriend accidentally suffocated while performing oral sex, saying that the man wasn't convicted and "got off, in more ways than one."
At some point in the podcast, the Oregon Republican said, "There's literally two attractive women in my town."
Skarlatos apologized in a statement shared by his campaign to the Chronicle.
"Looking back at the comments I made as a 24-year-old who just left the Army, I'm disappointed," he said. "I apologize if I offended anyone."
Notice the word "if." Well, it gets worse.
Within the past few months, Skarlatos has also "liked" photos of underage girls wearing bikinis and other skimpy outfits on Instagram. One such photo, posted by a then-17-year-old girl this past March, shows her in a string bikini bottom and a sweatshirt raised to display her midriff.
Since 2020, Skarlatos liked dozens of photos of teenage girls, including several in which the girls are wearing two-piece bathing suits or midriff-baring crop tops. The two youngest girls were 15 at the time Skarlatos liked their pictures, according to Instagram posts they made on their birthdays.
Skarlatos came up with a pretty lousy excuse.
"To imply that a 'follow' or a 'like' of social media influencers on Instagram with over 100,000 followers is inappropriate is absurd," Skarlatos said.
Sorry, Mr. Man, but I have never liked or shared images of underaged boys or girls. That doesn't explain anything.
