Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL), who’s currently under fire for his latest racist outburst, was apparently the “laughing stock” among students during his time at Harvard University, was accused of “bribing” students to win an election, and allegedly tried to deceptively award himself with a $24,000 grant, an ex-classmate of his told Zeteo in its report Wednesday.
That classmate is Adam Feldman, an editor and theater critic for Time Out Worldwide, and also a former student in government at Harvard along with Fine, who Feldman described as having been “tainted by scandal on multiple occasions,” and someone who “people just rolled their eyes at.”
“I was in Harvard's Undergraduate Council when Fine was there, and he was a laughing stock: not just a pompous prig, but also outrageously corrupt,” Feldman has previously said, providing new details of his knowledge of Fine to Zeteo in its report Wednesday.
In its research, Zeteo also uncovered a past scandal documented in the Harvard Crimson – the university’s student newspaper – where Fine was accused of awarding himself an $8,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, which Fine later revealed was actually a $24,000 grant. Fine told the Crimson that he had spent the money in full, but “didn’t say how.”
Fine was also alleged to have paid the fees for members of Harvard’s Republican Club “so they would be able to vote for him in a failed attempt to win a club office,” the Crimson reported.
Fine’s frequent controversies, Feldman argued, were a manifestation of lofty career ambitions, which he said he observed during his time with the Florida lawmaker at Harvard.
“He clearly has an enormous personal ambition and drive that he’s always had,” Feldman told Zeteo. “What I would speculate is that the scandals reflect that drive.”
As a lawmaker, Fine has frequently made Islamophobic and genocidal remarks, with his most recent remark – suggesting dogs were preferable to Muslims – causing a fire storm on social media. The remark even sparked pushback from conservative figure Megyn Kelly, who on Tuesday torched the Florida lawmaker as a “full bigot.”
“What I figured out, you pathetic sweaty man, is when an idiot Muslim says ‘no dogs in NYC,’ instead of attacking the person or the policy, you went full bigot,” Kelly wrote Tuesday in a social media post on X. “F--- off.”