The 2018 midterm elections on Tuesday brought plenty of surprises and crazy occurrences, including, as AVN.com reported, Nevada brothel owner and self-described pimp Dennis Hof winning a seat in the state legislature despite being dead for three weeks by the time election day rolled around.
But one of the wilder races took place in Virginia, where a longtime investigative journalist who also happens to be the mother of Hollywood actress Olivia Wilde accused her Republican opponent of being unfit to hold office because he was, allegedly, a "devotee of Bigfoot erotica."
But Republican Denver Riggleman, the owner of a small distillery, won a seat in the United States House of Representatives anyway, dispatching 66-year-old investigative television journalist Leslie Cockburn with a 6.6 percentage point margin of victory.
In addition to her her decades of reporting for CBS News, NBS News and the PBS news documentary series Frontline, Cockburn—wife of journalist and left-wing commentator Alexander Cockburn—is the author of several books. During the campaign she was accused of anti-Semitism by Jewish Republican groups due to her 1991 book on United States-Israeli relations, Dangerous Liaison.
But Cockburn was not above negative campaigning against Riggleman, herself, posting to her Twitter account that the Republican “has been exposed as a devotee of Bigfoot erotica. This is not what we need on Capitol Hill.”
She linked in the tweet to a social media post by Riggleman showing a crude drawing of the legendary, and mythical, “Sasquatch” creature with a black bar shielding the Bigfoot genital region, complete with the word “censored.”
Riggleman scoffed at the allegation, saying that the drawing was part of his own book, The Mating Habits of Bigfoot, a collection of gags that he referred to as “a long running prank” between himself and his friends.
"It has nothing to do with Bigfoot erotica," Riggleman said in response to Cockburn’s allegation.
Wilde, who starred in the HBO drama about the 1970s music industry, Vinyl, campaigned for her mother during the race, and after Cockburn’s defeat praised her mother as “incredible” and said that the campaign “restored my faith in this country.”
Photo By Gnashes30 / Wikimedia Commons
