Chris Lee's resignation from the House on Feb. 9 may be the quickest political downfall in history: It came just three hours after Gawker published a photo of Lee standing in the mirror shirtless, along with a story about how the married congressman dabbled in a little online dating on Craigslist.
Lee's sudden exit took many people by surprise. Hadn't other members of Congress admitted to worse than an unconsummated, PG-13 flirtation and managed to stay in office? It turns out Lee may have had good reason to step out of the spotlight so quickly: It wasn't just women that the Craigslist Congressman was hunting for on the Internet.
In the past two weeks, two D.C.-area transgender women contacted us, each with a separate story about exchanging emails with the ex-congressman. One sent us an ad that Lee allegedly posted on Craigslist in search of trans women; the other sent us a never-before-seen photo that she says Lee sent her after they started chatting by email. Taken together, they present a possible explanation to those who have wondered why such a tame "sex scandal" forced Lee's hand so quickly.
The first woman who reached out to us was a pre-op transgender woman from Arlington, Virginia who we'll call Fiona.
Fiona told us she replied to an ad that appeared in the "casual encounters" section of Craigslist in mid-January. She used Craigslist's "e-mail this posting to a friend" link to send the ad to herself, she explained, so even though the ad no longer appears on the site, she was able to forward us a copy:
Sexy Classy guy for passable TS/CD - m4t - 39 (Cap Hill)
Date: 2011-01-14, 8:55PM EST
New to area. Very fit classy, successful guy. 39, 6ft 190lbs, blond/blue. smooth hard body. Looking for a sexy ts/cd that i can spoil. I promise not to disappoint.
Craigslist personals are removed within seven days of posting, so there's no way to verify what the ad exactly looked like.
But Google does cache index pages on Craigslist, and we were able to confirm that an ad with precisely the same headline was posted on the evening of January 14, which is convincing evidence that the ad is genuine.
Revealingly, the headline and ad itself contain many elements from Lee's first known Craigslist flirtation, including the words "fit" and "classy." It dates to the same evening Lee exchanged emails with the woman we told you about two weeks ago. And it even featured Lee's infamous shirtless Blackberry picture, albeit cropped to hide Lee's face. Yes, that's right: a member of Congress posted a personal ad seeking transsexuals and crossdressers and even included a picture of himself, all without thinking twice, apparently.
Fiona's case was both similar to and utterly unlike Lee's first dalliance, the woman whose story we shared with you earlier this month. "It was quite interesting when I realized the other one was black and 34, because I am black and 34." Unlike the other subject of Lee's interest, however, Fiona was not born a woman.
When we spoke to Fiona by phone, she sounded entirely genuine. She told us that she'd corresponded with Lee by email several times and he told her that he'd dated a transsexual woman while "in college in California." (Lee went to business school at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.) Fiona said she found out who Lee was much the same way the other Craigslist correspondent did. "I copied and pasted his email into Facebook, and that's when his picture of him and his wife and his little boy showed up. Then I clicked on the link and realized he was a politician from New York, and I was like OMG."
She emailed him a few more times before telling him in an email on January 21 that she knew who he really was. He never replied, Fiona says.
http://gawker.com/#!5769037/the-craigslist-congressman-and-the-crossdressing-prostituteThe other person who contacted us shortly after our story was published was a transvestite who lives and works in Washington, D.C. We'll call her Holly.
The first thing Holly sent us was a never-before-seen picture of Chris Lee's now-familiar torso and red Blackberry. She edited the picture to obscure the Congressman's face, however, and printed her email address over his chest. (We have covered up the address in the photo above.) If we wanted to publish the unedited image, Holly explained, we'd have to pay her for it.
It didn't take very long to determine that Holly was a prostitute. We found a profile for her on an escort website which featured the same email address that she'd used to contact us. When we asked about her chosen line of work, Holly confirmed it. She was a working girl, she explained, and a man using Lee's email address had responded to a "Trans for Men" ad she'd posted on Craigslist.
We exchanged emails with Holly for more than a week in an effort to get her to share the email exchanges she had with Lee as well as the photos he sent her, including an unedited version of the picture she sent us at the outset. But even after we agreed to pay her the amount she'd requested for the material, she had trouble deciding if she wanted to follow through. "I kinda feel sorry for him at the moment," she wrote in one of her last emails to us before disappearing much like Fiona.
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