Staffers for millionaire/wrestling magnate/failed GOP Senate candidate say they were stiffed, got bad checks and condoms: "you're screwed"

Linda McMahon (a wrestling magnate who built up the WWE with her husband Vince McMahon) is a failed Republican Senate candidate in Connecticut with a reported net worth of $500M, who has spent a reported $100M on a pair of failed Senate bids. She has also reportedly stiffed her staffers, who claim that they were sent bounced checks from the campaign, and, when they complained, were sent more rubber checks, along with a condom and a message saying "you're screwed." From CBS:

Campaign staffer Twaine Don Gomes was reportedly among the first to make the matter of the bad checks public knowledge through local news media – an action which allegedly inspired the campaign to send a second check with something extra.
“Basically he handed me a check with a condom in it, told me I was screwed,” Gomes told WTNH. “That’s the rudest gesture you can ever do to a person, it’s like spitting in a person’s face.”

Checks Issued By McMahon Campaign Reportedly Bounce

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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soylent_plaid

Republicans. Eminently principled people.
- http://twitter.com/chrisjimson chris jimson
  
  Hey . . . she’s just being “fiscally conservative.”
Rens Houben

Classy.
- rtb61
  
  More like stupid. It is a criminal act to knowingly pass a cheque that will not be covered, it’s called fraud. Doing it repeatedly is conspiring to commit fraud.
  When you pay with a cheque you must do it upon the honest basis that you have the funds to cover it, failing to do so is a criminal act.
  - Martijn
    
    So I expect she’s going to prison for this? And the staffers will sue her for the money owed?
    - GlyphGryph
      
      Well, of course she’s not going to /prison/. She’s Wealthy, and you need to do more than break a few laws to go to prison when you’re one of the “important” people.
  - C W
    
    “More like stupid.”
    
    Only when the underclass does so. McMahon only made “an error of judgment”.
fuzzyfuzzyfungus

Ah, ‘personal responsibility’ in action…
http://blog.trenchcoatsoft.com Ross

Employees of candidate whose party holds that the unsuccessful are worthless losers who should starve shocked when they are treated like worthless losers who should starve just because they were unsuccessful.
- smallteam
  
  Condoms make great bootstraps!
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/Marooned2/from/mbard Ceronomus

Last I knew, intentionally writing bad checks is “Check Fraud” and is a criminal offense. Let’s see some charges pressed.
- Nathan Bruckert
  
  I wonder what staffer will take the blame and go to prison for it?
  - http://profiles.google.com/marc.k.mielke Marc Mielke
    
    Why would anyone? They already know she’s not going to pay them to!
waetherman

Writing a bad check by accident is a mistake. Writing another bad check knowing it is going to bounce is a crime. Tasteless prison condom joke optional.
- http://twitter.com/jmtd Jonathan Dowland
  
  How does anyone know that the second cheque will bounce?
  - http://tortoise-brand-pot-scrubbing-cleaner.myopenid.com/ Mister
    
    Umm, isn’t that what the condom and the “you’re screwed” message imply?
  - http://www.facebook.com/katrina.bradshaw1 Katrina Blackstone
    
    It has rubber on it…of course it will bounce…:P ok…I’m going to hell now.
shutz

“That’s the rudest gesture you can ever do to a person,”

I can think of much ruder things. Republicans have no imagination.
http://twitter.com/fossilfuels Funk Daddy

These fools didn’t realize they were contractors working on commission? ( as all employees are viewed by many on that side of things )
- C W
  
  Hey, when you’re a campaign staffer you have no concept of what life under your candidate is going to feel like. I hope they enjoyed the taste!
http://www.leidentech.com leidentech

The article is unclear… was it a used condom?
- millie fink
  
  ewwwww
  
  But yeah, the justice there would’ve been poetic.
- http://bannedsorcery.com/ Bryce Anderson
  
  More likely it just had a pinhole poked in the tip.
Another Kevin

I’d seen the article – and suspect it was a metaphorical condom, representing both the rubber check and the screwed-ness of the campaign worker.

And a psychopath has no trouble rationalizing this sort of behaviour. If the campaign workers had been doing their jobs, she’d have won the election right? If they weren’t doing their jobs, why should they get paid? (Now let me go wash – even that much attempt to empathize with a psychopath is disturbing.)
- Thomas Thurston
  
  Yeah. I think in this case “basically” is being used as a synonym for “It’s as if”. But totally fucked up behavior, that is true.
morcheeba

Who vetted this nutjob? The Connecticut GOP has gone beyond tarnishing their name; I’m not sure I’d trust their next candidate.
- http://bannedsorcery.com/ Bryce Anderson
  
  Vetted? The woman is worth $500M. She was vetted by the free market! Why do you hate our fiefdoms I mean freedoms?
  - http://profiles.google.com/marc.k.mielke Marc Mielke
    
    Considering the proximity to Vince’s penis required I’ll grant that she earned every penny.
- GawainLavers
  
  Well, the Connecticut Democrats gave us Joe Lieberman and Chris Dodd…I think I’d just vote against any Connecticut candidates, just to be safe.
Colin Curry

I can see how the distribution of birth control would be grossly offensive to a republican. Do you think that McMahon really intended the message “I screwed you”?
http://evilbobdayjob.blogspot.com/ Deidzoeb

At least this shows Republicans are displaying a better understanding of contraceptives. They know to put on the condom after getting stiff.
Alan Wexelblat

I would say she’s following in the lead of her party’s nominee. In the Boston area staffers leaving the Romney gathering found that they were unable to use campaign credit cards when they tried to pay for cabs on arrival at home. Yes, that’s right, Romney’s team cancelled their cards while the staffers were on their way home. People who had put hotel rooms on campaign credit cards likewise awoke to rude surprises the next morning.
- Halloween_Jack
  
  Came here to say this. Just a reminder that Romney’s real business expertise involved kicking his employees to the curb as soon as he could get away with it.
Jorpho

If the story is inaccurate, then the lack of ambiguity is commendable, at least.

The only thing worse than being completely screwed over is being completely screwed over but also left with the slightest shred of hope that there might have been some mistake and that you should persist.
Ipo

Stupid waste. Wankers don’t need condoms.
welcomeabored

“That’s the rudest gesture you can ever do to a person, it’s like spitting in a person’s face.”

Without exercising my imagination at all, I can think of far ruder ‘gestures’. There is a lot of upside to this story: 1) Gomer got his pound of flesh and likely a valid check eventually; 2) Linda is unlikely is run for office again; 3) If she does, no experienced political staffer worth their salt will work for her.
jandrese

The condom bit is pushing my BS meter into the orange. I suppose its not impossible that it happened that way, but that’s a lot of effort and expense on someone’s part. I strongly suspect that if this happened, then we’re not seeing a lot of the story here. It’s entirely possible that the person making the complaint about the bad check is a scammer or someone with a chip on their shoulder.

I have no trouble believing that McMahon is bouncing checks, but the rest of the story is too crazy to accept at face value.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop
  
  It seems as if the quote about the condom came from someone who was speaking metaphorically (but unclearly) and whoever wrote the original article misunderstood. The actual part was that the staffers were being sent bad checks.
  - Jem Sweeney
    
    I was gonna say. All those condoms would have cost significant coin. Doesn’t sound fiscally responsible to me.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Condoms are handed out for free pretty much everywhere. They could just go to the nearest college campus and fill up the back of a pick-up.
      
      I won’t make any inference.
- Bevatron Repairman
  
  It’s certainly true that getting your bills paid by a losing campaign is hard — debts from campaigns can sit on the books for decades. My guess is that McMahon repaid as much of her campaign loans as she could with remaining cash-on-hand (there was $5M or so in mid-October, sayeth the FEC) immediately after the election and the money people didn’t account for the remaining operating expenses windup so there was no money left in the till when this guy wrote the check.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Well, that’s the kind of financial planning I want in my elected leaders!
  - Al_Packer
    
    Or she diverted the remaining funds into her own bank account.
    - http://profiles.google.com/marc.k.mielke Marc Mielke
      
      With all the fund-raising he did — to the detriment of actual campaigning — I’ll be shocked if Mitt Romney DIDN’T divert his campaign war chest to one of the countries where his money lives.
Hillary Rettig

Stories like this one and the Romney campaign’s cancelling the credit cards before the staff even got home are of a piece with the Romney campaign’s IT screwup, a lot of which involved contempt for the workers involved (poor training, poor documentation, etc.) Typical Republican contempt for the workers, and blame for the workers when it’s the bosses who screw up.
margaretpoa

You supported a teabag Republican and you KNOW what they are like and you’re surprised? It would have been okay if she’d won and then screwed the rest of us in similar fashion though, I’ll bet. Cry me a river. You made your bed.
- C W
  
  I can hope that some of them channel it into a sense of perspective.
Mitchell Glaser

If you lie down with dicks, you’re liable to wake up with condoms.
http://johnstonsigns.blogspot.com/ dejoh

Thats why when I do work for politicians (Signs), I always get it up front. No matter who wins, your covered.
That goes back to the stone age.
http://twitter.com/kpkpkp Kevin Pierce

Accompanying Audio:
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http://www.megawavs.com/play.aspx?id=6722

(with apologies to BB’s own Navin Johnson)
sean

Hey, he got off light- she coulda kicked him in the crotch like on youtube. Besides, as a republican advising her, I think his compensation was just about what he deserved.
niktemadur

But she looks so nice from the campaign picture!
From first-hand experience, point-blank range, the staffers now know what republicans are about, at the very least from now on they should change their political allegiance, and pass it on to their families, extended families, friends, etc.
turbokoala

McMahon was vile throughout the race. On election day, her “volunteers” wore purple and yellow shirts at polling stations that looked suspiciously like the logo of the SEIU. Then it turned out that the volunteers were actually paid staffers who didn’t know what McMahon stood for and were not voting for her. She hired young African-Americans to go out into black communities in the larger cities in Connecticut and tell them to split their ballot for Obama and McMahon. I hope losing a tenth of a billion dollars on campaigning has taught her to stay out for good. (source: I live in New Haven.)
Emily Bond

She pulled this sort of thing on her employees back when she was involved with the WWE (wrestling), too. She got beaten by a huge margin because of stuff like this, being worth that much and not paying her mortgage,…. and claiming to be pro-women’s-health and even pro-choice in her flyers the last week of the campaign, after being absolutely the opposite the whole way along. And also sending flyers to everyone EVERY FREAKING DAY, calling people at home – even those NOT registered as Republicans, buying every available minute of airtime….. And, for bonus lulz, she and another Republican got an “Independent” party (yes, really – disgusting, huh?) to put a line in and endorse them. Cause, you know, real independents are so dumb that they’re going to fall for that, even though they’re a good third of the state. This is New England; our independents are often quite proud of that fact.

The general consensus around here was that she was just an all around selfish, deceptive, spammy bitch (that’s about the nicest word people used), and that’s why almost no one but hardline Republicans voted for her… and women disliked her even more than men because she acted so nasty. Turbokoala has it right. Dunno why she didn’t learn her lesson the first time.

-another CT voter
Repurposed

Maybe this should be settled in the ring?