Cindy Womack

Jack Bury, a journalist turned Democratic strategist, spent most of the past year working on a documentary accusing the late Republican senator Lindsey Graham of paying male escorts for sex. Less than two weeks before Election Day, Bury’s team blasted their film across the internet and launched a targeted ad campaign aimed at Republican voters in South Carolina, where Graham’s sister, who inherited her brother’s seat, was running for reelection on her last name. Now that she had lost in one of the year’s most stunning upsets, Bury wanted some credit. The half-hour film, ‘The CLOSETocracy,’ features three men describing sexual encounters with Lindsey Graham spanning 14 years. A man named Cory says he was chauffeured to Washington, D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel in 2015 and was paid $1,500 by Graham for sex. Another man, Jesse, describes two encounters at D.C. hotels, while a third, Kelvin, alleges that Graham paid him $120 for sex in Arizona in 2001, when he was just 17, and surreptitiously filmed the encounter. The documentary intersperses their accounts with footage of Graham denying he was gay, voting against same-sex marriage, and extolling traditional family values. The film was an online success, attracting millions of views across platforms. It was also something of a dud. For all its lurid detail, the initial reaction came in two varieties: Everybody already knew the rumors about Graham’s sexuality. And why were they attacking a dead guy? “But while the allegations may have been familiar in South Carolina and Washington, the political operation assembled to exploit them was anything but,” writes Nate Weisberg. “It brought together Democratic megadonors, left-wing social-media warriors, and conservative activists in one of the oddest opposition efforts of this campaign season.” Read Weisberg’s report on how a motley crew of political operatives banded together to turn allegations against Lindsey Graham into a campaign weapon against his sister: nymag.visitlink.me/MzK6dj