After attempting to weather a torrid and humiliating sex scandal, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley resigned in disgrace on Monday, smiling for a shuddersome mugshot as he served the first moments of a 30-day sentence in jail.
In the days leading up to the saga’s dramatic climax, a lawyer for the Alabama House Judiciary Committee released a 131-page report detailing Bentley’s adulterous relationship with his former senior political adviser, Rebekah Mason.
The report reads more like a Harlequin romance than a political document, moving fluently between subheadings with almost literary titles such as “The Kitchen Confrontation,” “The Parking Lot Confrontation,” and “The Vehicle Incident.”
Buried on page 80 is a bizarre anecdote involving the governor’s former body man Stan Stabler, who claims that 70-year-old Bentley’s proclivity for using emojis in text messages raised his suspicions about the affair.
From the report:
Stan Stabler, who served as a “body man” for Governor Bentley on Lewis’s detail, says he began to notice that Governor Bentley was developing new text-messaging habits. He would frequently see in passing, or reflected on Governor Bentley’s passenger window in the vehicle, emojis in Governor Bentley’s text messages. He thought this strange behavior for a gentleman in his seventies. He says he probably saw a couple of these, and recalls language like: “I’m glad you’re my friend” or “you’re handsome.”
Stabler then relayed those observations to Bentley’s head of security Ray Lewis who confronted the governor in the early days of August 2014.
There are many lessons to be learned from the long trail of errors tracing Bentley’s path from the Governor’s Mansion to the Montgomery County Jail, but perhaps one of the most salient of those lessons may be as simple as this — gentlemen don’t use emojis.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
