Doug Emhoff has dismissed bombshell stories that he slapped his ex-girlfriend and had an affair during his first marriage as a ‘distraction’, but didn’t deny them.
DailyMail.com reported in August that Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, cheated on his first wife Kerstin and got the family’s nanny pregnant.
Earlier this month a story emerged that Emhoff ‘slapped’ an ex-girlfriend at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012. He also faced allegations he was a ‘misogynist’ to colleagues at the Los Angeles law firm he ran.
Emhoff was asked by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Friday whether the allegations about his personal life ‘p***ed’ him off.
The Morning Joe host didn’t question him over the details or ask whether DailyMail.com reports about his past were true.
Scarborough even reduced them to being ‘tabloid’ stories being pushed by Donald Trump and Republican critics.
But Emhoff avoided the chance to slap them down and instead brushed them off while he insisting he was focused on his wife’s presidential campaign.
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff was asked about ‘tabloid’ stories during an interview on MSNBC. He didn’t deny bombshell DailyMail.com stories, instead saying he and his VP wife ‘don’t have time to be p***** off’
His campaign has denied the allegations of the slap, while his statement on the affair stopped far short of a denial.
‘We don’t have time to be p***ed off,’ he told Scarborough. ‘We don’t have time to focus on it. It’s all a distraction. It’s designed to try to get us off our game.’
‘Does it get you off your game?’ Scarborough asked him.
‘No. All we are doing – all we talk about – is this election,’ Emhoff responded.
‘We understand the stakes, we understand the responsibility,’ he said, shifting the topic to Harris’ run against former President Donald Trump.
‘Our very country, our future – what kind of future are we going to have, who would you like picking the next three Supreme Court justices? The guy who picked the three who overturned Roe v. Wade and want to take away more freedom?’ he asked.
Earlier this week, DailyMail.com published complaints from a discrimination suit against the L.A. law office he ran.
The story included a claim he hired an ‘unqualified’ part-time model as a legal secretary ‘because she was young, attractive and friendly with the powerful men in the office’.
In August, DailyMail.com exclusively revealed that Emhoff’s first marriage ended when he got his children’s nanny pregnant.
The woman, Najen Naylor, 47, did not deny the story when approached by DailyMail.com at her home in the New York millionaires’ playground, The Hamptons.
She would not comment, except to say, ‘I’m kind of freaked out right now.’
In response to the story about the nanny, Emhoff acknowledged ‘tough times’ in his marriage, while steering clear of the details.
‘During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions,’ he said in a statement.
‘I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side.’
At the start of October, DailyMail.com uncovered allegations that Emhoff allegedly struck a woman in the face in France 11 years ago.
The woman, who was not named, dated Emhoff for three months and allegedly called her friends about the incident during a late night.
A spokesperson for Emhoff denied the assault allegations, calling them ‘untrue’ in a statement to politics website Semafor.
We don’t have time to focus on it. It’s all a distraction. It’s designed to try to get us off our game,’ Emhoff said when asked about the reports
Emhoff got asked ‘how do you all stay centered’ after a series of reports on his past personal life and allegations about his conduct
Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff is accused of violently striking his former girlfriend – who DailyMail.com has chosen to refer to as ‘Jane’ – for allegedly flirting with another man during a booze-fueled altercation in 2012. (The couple is pictured together with Jane’s face obscured.)
Interviewer Joe Scarborough asked Emhoff about Donald Trump’s attacks and how he handles ‘tabloid stories about your personal life’
Scarborough got Emhoff going by pointing out that rival Donald Trump was ‘spreading it about you, saying that tabloid stories about your personal life. He’s saying it should be front and center, he’s saying it about your wife and making incredibly crude and lewd suggestions about her past life.’
‘I’m just curious, I know I seem like a very zen, mindful person, but I think I’d be p***** off, and I’m just wondering, how do you all stay centered, how do you stay disciplined and not really go off and not really push back hard at these things?’
Trump has made a series of public comments relating to Harris’ past relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
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