Image Lee sent to woman in Maryland
The warning to the parents of the 26th Congressional District could not have been more stark.
“Responding to what may seem like a friendly e-mail or an appealing marketing offer can have serious consequences,” Rep. Chris Lee wrote in June 2009 in a column in the Tonawanda News. “Private information and images can so easily be transmitted to friends and strangers alike.”
Lee, obviously, failed to heed his own warning.
The Amherst Republican was touting legislation aimed at helping protect youngsters from “the dangers and unknowns associated with a medium that is growing by several billion web pages per day.”
And by ignoring his own warning about the temptations of the Internet, Lee brought an abrupt end Wednesday to his own political career.
At about 2 p.m., Gawker — a website best known for stories about Lindsay Lohan and other out-of-control celebrities — published e-mails between Lee and a single Maryland woman whom he met on Craigslist. One of the e-mails came with a photo of the local congressman, shirtless.
By 4 p.m., the story had hit the New York Daily News, New York magazine, Daily Kos and a host of other blogs.
Soon, Lee’s name appeared as one of the top 10 topics discussed on Twitter.
At 5 p.m., Lee resigned from Congress.
That was an astonishingly quick end to scandal in a city known for scandal.
It also shocked everyone, from people who knew Lee well to the partisans of the blogosphere.
A Democratic congressional aide said Lee — the man with the astonishingly beautiful wife, friends on both sides of the aisle and a knack for the tell-it-like-it-is quote — would be the last congressman he ever would expect to get caught up in scandal.
It also “may be the fastest-moving sex scandal ever,” Daily Kos observed.
After all, it took two days for then-Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer to resign in 2008 after revelations surfaced that he had frequented a prostitute.
And Rep. Eric J.J. Massa, D-Corning, suffered through five days of humiliation last year before leaving office amid allegations that he groped a man on his staff.
By nightfall Wednesday, though, Lee was no longer a congressman, not even a human being with tragic weaknesses, but merely a target in the biggest firing range ever invented by mankind, the Internet.
Megan Carpenter of Talking Points Memo pointed to Lee’s e-mails that identified himself as a divorced father of one when he is really married.
“The ‘divorced father of one’ part could happen earlier (depending on how well he works it out and the state in which it gets filed),” Carpenter observed.
And on Wonkette, he was Rep. Chris Lee (R-Casual Encounters) and a “weirdo.”
Christopher Malagisi, an East Amherst native and Republican activist who also serves as an adjunct professor in political science at American University in Washington, D.C., learned about the developments from a colleague after they already had played out.
“It was kind of done before it even had broken,” Malagisi said. “I went straight to Twitter and Facebook. I could see the feed already and all the information about it. There really wasn’t much time to think about it.”
For Malagisi, also active in the young conservative movement, it leaves an ignominious mark on a seat previously held by Jack F. Kemp, Bill Paxon and Thomas M. Reynolds.
“What a strange legacy that he’s leaving for such a powerful district and a rising star within the party,” he said.
Strange indeed. This well-liked young member of Congress and married father of one turns out to have flirted with a single woman on the Internet, trying to lure her in with a pack of lies — and his real name.
Once she Googled him, he was done. And one of the lies he told would stand out as the saddest of all.
Writing to the woman he didn’t know on Craigslist, Lee wrote: “I promise not to disappoint.”
