Jack Hunter knows the hell Elizabeth Lauten is going through these days because he’s been there, done that.
Lauten, now a former communications director for Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.), is the latest political figure to be buried by the news media in a controversy that exploded out of nowhere after she posted Thanksgiving Day comments critical of President Obama’s daughters on Facebook.
“It’s really horrible to be at the bottom of a media pile-on. You feel helpless,” Hunter told the Washington Examiner. “Going through it does give you a new sympathy for others in similar situations, even when they do deserve criticism or scorn. It’s something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”
In mid-2013, Hunter, then an aide to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was the subject of an extensive report by the Washington Free Beacon, which uncovered his past as a South Carolina radio “shock jock,” before he teamed up with Paul to help write a campaign book.
Hunter often voiced opinions on the radio favoring Southern secession and white supremacy. He called himself the Southern Avenger and sometimes wore a mask in public that featured a print of the Confederate flag.
In the Beacon article, Hunter disavowed his past behavior, which mostly took place between 1999 and 2012. After followup stories on him from the Daily Beast and the New Republic piled up for two weeks, he resigned from Paul’s staff.
By contrast, Lauten’s post was quickly picked up by the news media and condemned by a wide variety of political pundits. Her apology and resignation followed in rapid-fire succession.
Even so, Lauten was the subject of numerous media reports, from obscure blogs, to ABC News to the New York Times. The Smoking Gun website dug up a court report from 2000 stating that at 17, she was arrested for larceny.
There was also a barrage of hate-filled Twitter messages sent to Lauten, some of which featured a photo that appeared to show her posing with the neck of a beer bottle pushed into her mouth.
Since her resignation Monday, Lauten fallen publicly silent. She has not tweeted or granted interviews.
“Sometimes people say really stupid things to the detriment of their bosses, as I once did,” Hunter said. “I was targeted for asinine and offensive things I had said in the past, that didn’t represent me anymore; things I was personally embarrassed about long before the controversy arose.”
After Hunter but before Lauten, there was Benny Johnson. He was accused over the summer of multiple instances of plagiarism during his tenure as an editor at BuzzFeed.
He was fired after anonymous bloggers drew attention to his writing and other outlets, including the Washington Post, Politico and the popular blog Gawker, picked it up.
The former BuzzFeed editor landed a job a few months later as a social media strategist at National Review. Johnson did not respond to the Examiner‘s request for comment.
Hunter managed his comeback by writing a first-person essay in Politico Magazine. He now works as an editor for the Right-leaning news site Rare.
“Time goes on. Life gets better,” Hunter said.
