Rep. Nancy Mace's Former Aide Testified She Tasked Him With Blackmailing Her Ex
Well, this is messy.
There’s unhinged, there’s MAGA unhinged, and then there is South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace unhinged. Her weirdest hits include Bathroom Genital Obsession, Handshaked To Death, I Was Raped So Trump Can’t Be A Rapist, Screaming At A Constituent In Ulta Beauty, and most recently, Showing Blurry Naked Pictures Of Herself On The House Floor.
It says a lot about the current state of Republican crazy and Nancy Mace crazy that the Showing Blurry Naked Pictures Of Herself On The House Floor story barely raised one of our eyebrows.
“That was weird,” we shrugged.
But now the word “blackmail” has popped up, and our interest is piqued!
Peep this Daily Beast headline: “Nancy Mace Named by Former Aide in Naked Photos ‘Blackmail’ Plot.”
The accusation comes from a deposition taken of Mace’s former aide and political advisor, Wesley Donehue, who claimed that Mace had been trying to use pictures from the phone of her former fiancé, Patrick Bryant, to blackmail Bryant into giving her full ownership of two pricey pieces of property, worth $5.5 million, that they’d purchased together in happier times. HMM!
Rewind, if you have also not been following this drama:
Back in February, Mace gave an hour-long “stunningly graphic speech” interspersed with Bible verses, accusing four men — her former fiancé Patrick Bryant, and also Brian Musgrave, Eric Bowman and John Osbourne — of “incapacitating women,” rape, voyeurism, sex trafficking, witness intimidation, and “premeditated, calculated exploitation of innocent women and girls in my district.” And she displayed a poster with their pictures and the word “PREDATORS” in large type across the top, and “STAY AWAY FROM” across the bottom.
“Today I'm going scorched earth. [...] Today I’m going to free myself from the monster who broke me. Today I'm going to free other women who fell prey to the same man.”
Very serious accusations! Holy defamation!
Her whole speech is quite wild. At one point she even pulls out a safe, claiming that Bryant tried to hide his phone from her “in a safe just like this one.”
However, none of the four men have been charged with any crimes. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division said that they opened an investigation of Mace’s accusations way back in December of 2023, but 17 months later, they have not found enough evidence to charge anyone with anything. Mace claims no one has been charged because South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson is a doing a coverup, but Wilson claims “our office has not received any reports or requests for assistance from any law enforcement or prosecution agencies regarding these matters.”
Complicating things, Wilson is likely to be Mace’s opponent if she runs for governor of South Carolina in 2026.
And Mace was not done after that speech. Last Tuesday, during a hearing for the House Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Subcommittee, which Mace chairs, titled “Breach of Trust: Surveillance in Private Spaces,” she brought out stills that she said were of herself being secretly recorded, from videos she claims she got from Bryant’s devices that she happened to be combing through after she found him on dating apps, as a mature person does in a healthy relationship.
The accused men deny everything. Said Bryant on Facebook,
Mace is suing one of the men, Eric Bowman, not for assault or sharing her nudes or whatever exactly he allegedly did to be called a predator by her, but for defamation, because he said on Facebook that she was influencing the award of Department of Veterans Affairs contracts to her friends. An opinion a person is allowed to have!
And one of the accused, Brian Musgrave, is suing Mace for defamation and libel. Musgrave says he is co-owner of the condo with Bryant in Isle of Palms where Mace claims she was “incapacitated, raped and filmed,” but says he has no other connection to her other than seeing her and Bryant out together a handful of times, and no knowledge of her being raped, and while there is a very visible security camera in the kitchen of the condo where Mace claims these events took place, he claims he has no access to that camera’s footage.
So now, on to the blackmail accusations:
Mace’s former aide and political advisor, Wesley Donehue, testified in a deposition that he was tasked by Mace to call up Bryant and tell him that Mace had found pictures of women on his phone, to blackmail him into giving her ownership of the two pieces of property Mace and Bryant bought together, a $3.9 million home on the Isle of Palms, and a $1.6 million Capitol Hill townhouse that had been the subject of an ethics complaint.
From the Daily Beast’s Farrah Tomazen, who claims to have a copy of the deposition:
One [photo] allegedly showed a girl on a couch, seemingly passed out with a blanket over her, and another was said to be a photo of someone being photographed up their skirt.
Donehue claimed that Mace’s aim was “to use all the information that she found as leverage to gain 100 percent ownership” of two homes they shared: one in Washington D.C., and the other in South Carolina’s Isle of Palms.
“Did Nancy ever task you with communicating with Patrick Bryant about her possession of these alleged photographs in asking you to essentially help her blackmail Patrick into giving over 100 percent ownership?” the lawyer asked, according to the filing.
“Yes,” Donehue replied.
From the Daily Mail’s Geoff Earle, who also said he saw the deposition:
'Did she specifically say to you 'Please meet with Patrick and show him these images and tell him I'll make them public if he doesn't give me both houses?' a lawyer for Bryant asked the former Mace advisor.
'Yes,' he responded.
Asked if it was 'effectively an effort to extort or blackmail Patrick,' Donehue responded, 'Yeah.'
Donehue says he told her,
Nancy, as your campaign consultant, if it ever comes out that you knew of women being harmed and you didn't do anything about it, your career is over.
Donehue also claimed in the deposition that Mace told him she was physically assaulted by Bryant, and showed him bruises. And yet, Donehue said, Mace planned a vacation with Bryant in the Caribbean, over Donehue’s protests.
“I said, ‘Nancy, you can’t say you fear for your safety and you’re going to the Caribbean with him and some of his friends,’” he said. “Then she said — I remember as clear as day —“I’m taking my free vacation to the Caribbean.”
Donehue testified that he fired Mace as a client not long after, because “her emotional stability was crumbling” and she “was coming across as erratic and unstable.” He was also uncomfortable with her bawdy talk.
Nancy talks about her sex life in a way that I've never heard a client or a woman talk about, it’s like every conversation would devolve into what’s going on in her sex life…something that she talked about all the time and I always felt uncomfortable with.
Bletch.
Hey, is blackmail covered by the Speech or Debate clause?
Four days after Mace first made accusations, her and Bryant’s DC condo sold for $1.98 million, a tidy profit. How much Mace put into the properties from her $174,000 Congressional salary and whatever book royalties we don’t know, or how much she got of the proceeds; she’s filed an extension of her financial disclosure. But previous disclosures show she’s been renting out the South Carolina house they bought together with a $2.9 million mortgage, and pocketing the proceeds on that, somewhere in the range of $100,000-$1,000,000 a year.
Make of that what you will!
All we know for sure is, don’t buy property with somebody you aren’t married to, at least not without some kind of contract specifying what happens when you break up. It is always a mess.
[New York Times archive link/ Daily Beast archive link / Post and Courier ]
Yay, substack is working again!
"And when the doctor said I no longer had worms, that was the best day in my life!" — R. Wiggum.
"All we know for sure is, don’t buy property with somebody you aren’t married to, at least not without some kind of contract specifying what happens when you break up."
This is the sort of woman that, when you break up with her, she sets fire to your car.
I'm not sure a contract is really going to cover that sort of thing.