A Michigan college student whose name was used in an embarrassingly bad attempt to smear Pete Buttigieg says two far right conservative activists promised him a house in exchange for going along with accusations of rape against the Democratic presidential candidate.
In a Medium post published under the name Hunter Kelly, which has since been blocked by Medium, "Mayor Pete" was falsely accused of raping Kelly after supposedly meeting him in a Washington, D.C. hotel bar. The post says Kelly awoke in a hotel room after having been sexually assaulted.
Kelly, 19, now denies ever meeting Buttigieg, and denies even ever being in D.C. before this week.
So, it's all false, of course, as The Daily Beast reports the two men behind the illegal scheme are notorious con men
It seems, according to The Daily Beast, that Kelly initially entertained the idea, and was flown out to D.C.
"For a week, Wohl had been attempting to find gay Republicans who would levy accusations against Buttigieg," the story goes. "Kelly appears to be the only one who took the bait."
Kelly expressed concerns, but later Burkman told him he was a "'star' and people are eating me up."
"Burkman and Wohl tried to calm him down by promising to purchase 'any house I wanted' and insisting that his family would 'get over it,'" Kelly says.
As Kelly's regret and protestations grew, "the duo turned to intimidation, telling him that backing out and leaving was 'not an option.'"
Kelly says the post was made without his permission and says he did not write it.
“Jack Burkman may have promised me a lavish lifestyle, but at a price that would cost me the two most important things to me: honesty and integrity," Kelly now says. "Had I gone forward with this despicable scheme they concocted, I would have lost both of those things and became another one of their useless pawns.”
Meanwhile, Huffpost calls Wohl a "fringe-right grifter" who "allegedly made terroristic threats against himself while harassing Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Burkman a "conspiracy theorist."
Here the two men are in a failed press conference in which they allegedly were to present a woman who allegedly was to have claimed to have credible accusations against Robert Mueller. (She did not show up.)
