Jeb Bush's allies reportedly planned to smear Marco Rubio with an unsubstantiated sex scandal rumor

(Image credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

last updated 30 November 2015

No election season is complete without a good scandal, and even those close to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio know that. According to an excerpt from McKay Coppins' forthcoming book The Wilderness, unsubstantiated rumors about Rubio have been swirling around him practically since he entered politics:

Jilted mistresses, sordid affairs, secret love children — Rubio’s team had heard it all […] One [rumor] that reporters in Florida had repeatedly tried to run down over the years dealt with a Tallahassee politico who Rubio had supposedly taken on several romantic out-of-state trips and paid for them with the state party's credit card. Another, even more pervasive rumor, held that Rubio was hiding a secret second family somewhere, and sending regular cash installments to support them (and keep them quiet). The details of this story varied substantially from one telling to another: sometimes the mother was a former Dolphins cheerleader; other times she wasn't. Sometimes there was one kid living with his mom in New York; other times there were two kids and they lived in Florida. [BuzzFeed]

To dispel any more talk of Rubio's alleged "zipper problem," Terry Sullivan, the head of a Rubio political action committee, went as far as to hire a firm to investigate. Nothing concrete was found — but that hasn't stopped Jeb Bush's allies from allegedly firing up the rumor mill once again, especially now that Rubio is a threat in the GOP presidential race. "Those who have looked into Marco's background in the past have been concerned with what they have found," a leaked document from the Bush campaign reportedly warned last month.

But so far, it's all talk. "Everybody who runs against him says he has girlfriends, or financial problems. They throw a lot of s--t at the wall. It's the same thing from the Jeb Bush camp. They keep telling me, 'Oh, we've got the thing that's going to take him down.' But nobody's ever produced anything that we all haven't read in the Tallahassee Democrat," MSNBC host Joe Scarborough told BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins. Sullivan himself reportedly joked that Rubio is "Cuban and [...] from Miami, so of course he has mistresses."

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

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