On October 2, the Daily Mail ran an explosive article claiming that Doug Emhoff, in a drunken rage, slapped an ex-girlfriend so hard that she was spun in a circle and left in tears. After two days of dead silence, Doug Emhoff has denied the claim. However, I can’t be the only one who finds it peculiar that Emhoff took two days to issue that denial. After all, this one should have been easy.

The story broke early on Wednesday:

Vice President Kamala Harris‘s husband assaulted his ex-girlfriend, three friends have told Dailymail.com.

The Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, 59, allegedly struck the woman in the face so hard she spun around, while waiting in a valet line late at night after a May 2012 Cannes Film Festival event in France.

One of her friends told DailyMail.com that the woman called him immediately after the incident, sobbing in her cab, and described the alleged assault.

DailyMail.com is not naming the woman, who is a successful New York attorney, but will refer to her by the pseudonym ‘Jane’.

A second friend said Jane, who had been dating Emhoff for three months, also told her about the alleged violence at the time.

A third friend told DailyMail.com that Jane first told her in 2014 that she had dated Emhoff, and recounted the full story of his alleged abuse in 2018, when then senator Harris was in the news after grilling Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a Senate hearing over sexual assault allegations.

That’s a very specific story with three corroborating witnesses. I found it believable because, given what a high-powered attorney Emhoff allegedly is/was, I find the current Beta male persona a bit theatrical. It’s easy to believe that there’s a lot of rage behind it. Moreover, the fact that Emhoff quite definitely impregnated a nanny while still married to his wife bespeaks a man who uses, rather than respects, women.

Also, despite being hearsay (meaning that a witness is reporting on someone else’s words), the women’s claims about the girlfriend’s statements would still be admissible in court. Under all rules of evidence, statements that can be classified as “present sense impression,” “excited utterances,” and “then-existing mental, emotional, or physical condition” are admissible. In those cases, it is the person testifying, not the declarant, whose honesty is a question for the finder of fact.

Once this accusation was out there, I expected one of two things to emerge from Kamala’s camp.

The first possibility was that Emhoff would immediately deny the accusation as a defamatory fiction. I mean, either it happened or it didn’t, and if it didn’t, he’d have first-person knowledge of its falsity and could instantly deny it.

Alternatively, Emhoff would waffle on about the event being misconstrued, the woman having mental issues, or some other narrative that would obliquely acknowledge a germ of truth to the story while simultaneously distancing himself from the accusation that he abuses women.

Unexpectedly, neither of those two things happened. Instead, we got two days of complete silence from the Kamala camp.

Only now, two days later, has Emhoff, speaking through a spokesman, denied the accusation that he struck his girlfriend while in a jealous, drunken rage:

Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, has denied that he struck his then-girlfriend over a decade ago in the belief she was flirting with another man.

“This report is untrue,” an Emhoff spokesperson told Semafor, adding that “any suggestion that he would or ever hit a woman is false.”

Since the girlfriend has not spoken up about what happened, if anything, whether you believe Emhoff or the people who allegedly heard the tale from the girlfriend pretty much depends on your political ideology.

The one thing I know with certainty, though, is that it’s weird that it took Emhoff two full days to deny something that he ought to have been able to deny in a single second. That sounds like a man taking extreme care before speaking to ensure that the girlfriend didn’t plan to wade into the matter. And anyone who takes that kind of care, rather than just speaking an objective truth that’s within his immediate knowledge...well, you can draw your own conclusions, right?

Image: Doug Emhoff. YouTube screen grab.

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ADDENDUM

The experimental podcast is a gypsy because, until we decide to make a permanent feature, it has no home on the site. For now, I’ll slot links to podcasts at the end of my posts.

The most recent podcast (from yesterday evening) can be viewed at Rumble or YouTube or heard on Libsyn or Apple.