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Republican Congressional Candidate Shamed for Allegedly Writing Bigfoot Erotica

The 2018 election cycle has taken a turn for the obnoxious. There’s a story going around that the candidate for a Congressional district in central Virginia has written about Bigfoot.

However, I’ve looked into this and I can’t find any evidence, just allegations.

From Huffington Post.

Democrat Leslie Cockburn sparked a Twitter frenzy on Sunday by sharing a curious drawing, apparently taken from Republican rival Denver Riggleman’s Instagram page, showing a Bigfoot-like creature with its genitals obscured by a “censored” sign.

Riggleman was “caught on camera campaigning with a white supremacist,” Cockburn wrote in the tweet, referring to video showing her opponent hitting the campaign trail with Isaac Smith, co-founder of the white nationalist group Unity & Security for America.

“Now he has been exposed as a devotee of Bigfoot erotica,” Cockburn continued.

Cockburn faces Riggleman on the November ballot for Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, which includes Charlottesville, the site of last year’s deadly white supremacist rally.

She later shared another image from Riggleman’s Instagram page (which has since been set to private). That image shows Riggleman’s face superimposed on a drawing of Bigfoot, which also has its genitals censored.

“My ‘buddies’ thought this pic was fitting for my birthday next week,” read a caption, “and to celebrate my new book release in about a month or 2… ‘Mating Habits of Bigfoot and Why Women Want Him.’”

Riggleman until recently had been promoting a self-published book with the same “Mating Habits of Bigfoot” title on Facebook, according to The Cook Political Report. He has since deleted that page.

You can see the two tweets below.

The problem with this story is that the allegations are being flung around without really any proof. All we have are two screenshots from Instagram but no context to understand them. There’s also no evidence of the supposed author page on Facebook, and the book that everyone says he wrote cannot be found on Goodreads and does not appear to exist.

Even assuming all the sources are legit, I can’t see anything here to convince me that he was doing anything more than joking around. The thing about a published book, folks, is that it is almost impossible to erase all evidence of it, so if you can’t find the book then there probably isn’t one.

Update: Rigglesman told the WaPo that there is no erotica, and what you see on Instagram is just a long-running gag about the satire he wrote 14 years ago.

While I am more than willing to change my opinion if anyone finds the book in question, right now there’s really no story here.

Next!

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Comments


Nirmala July 30, 2018 um 10:25 am

There is a picture of him with a Bigfoot sculpture on this page:
https://www.facebook.com/pg/DenverTheAuthor/posts/?ref=page_internal

So there does seem to be some kind of connection to Bigfoot.

Nate Hoffelder July 30, 2018 um 10:31 am

Okay, so there’s some evidence this is true. I do wish more people would take screenshots and post them.


James Seger July 30, 2018 um 10:58 am

I am a liberal and wouldn’t vote for a Republican at any rate. But if he wants to write Bigfoot erotica, more power to him. A good liberal should be supportive of someone’s right to let their freak flag fly.

The white supremacist stuff is bad. But leave his interest in Bigfoot porn alone.

Nate Hoffelder July 30, 2018 um 11:05 am

exactly


Peter Winkler July 30, 2018 um 6:36 pm

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-bigfoot-erotica-candidate-wants-you-to-know-its-all-anthropological?ref=scroll

Nate Hoffelder July 30, 2018 um 6:48 pm

So it really looks like his opponent slandered him – he wasn’t writing erotica.

I called it!


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