Let’s Talk About The Rumor
“In this situation, I think that where there’s smoke there’s probably attempted political arson.” - Liberal blogger James Conner
by Arren Kimbel-Sannit for Montana Free Press
We don’t know if incumbent Montana Congressman Matt Rosendale had a secret reason for dropping out of the race for U.S. Senate only six days after he launched his campaign, and chances are you don’t either.
But that lack of knowledge hasn’t stopped legions of readers, social media posters, sources of various degrees of authority and even candidates for governor from speculating rampantly, and publicly. The speculation reached its peak (so far) when former Democratic U.S. North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp, speaking earlier this week on a podcast popular with politicos and lapsed politicians, dropped a bomb: “Just to gossip a little bit,” she said, Rosendale dropped out of the Senate race, and might even resign his House seat, because he’d allegedly, according to what Heitcamp called “rumor,” impregnated a 20-year-old congressional staffer.
At least part of Heitkamp’s rumor is easy to disprove: Rosendale announced his candidacy for re-election to the House this week. Rosendale emphatically denied the rest of the rumor and threatened legal action against Heitkamp. His wife, Jean, went on television to publicly support her husband’s denial. But the rumor, which had been floating around in various formulations for weeks, never with evidence attached, had officially entered the news cycle.
Montana Free Press reporters have been aware of the rumors for weeks, and have sought to confirm whether there’s any truth to them. No one we’ve spoken to has presented anything approaching proof of such an affair, and neither has anyone taken responsibility for spreading the rumor. It’s not as if the truth doesn’t matter. It’s just that the only known person with a claim to firsthand knowledge of the truth is Matt Rosendale, and he says it didn’t happen. We have no way of knowing otherwise, and neither does anyone else who has so far fanned the speculation, either privately or publicly.
We have a pretty good idea, though, of how a political rumor of this magnitude takes root.
“I was one of the first 25 people to hear the rumor,” said Abra Belke, a Montana attorney and former lobbyist who has worked for lawmakers in both Washington, D.C., and Helena. “I happened to be in D.C. on the day it started circulating, and when there are no details, it’s just kind of a piece of hot political gossip. Everyone is going around the bars, saying, ‘Did you hear about Rosendale?’ Not anything more than that. But by the next day, enough people have heard the rumor that it’s a race to name the person who’s allegedly involved [in the alleged affair], and that’s when it gets really messy. There’s three different names, six different versions of the story. People are being named on Twitter, in the comment section of news articles.”
The news media, including MTFP, initially kept its distance. There are standards for publishing or even referencing unsubstantiated rumors, especially considering the logical prospect that such a damaging allegation is being wielded as a political or personal weapon, and even more especially given the possibility of a romantic relationship between people with vastly disparate degrees of power. Such a story requires multiple sources presenting consistent accounts, some kind of documentary evidence supporting the allegation, and a clear-eyed negotiation between the prerogatives of truth and the moral imperative to do no unnecessary harm. MTFP was unable to meet those standards, so we didn’t write about the rumor.
Meanwhile, multiple iterations of the rumor were spreading on social media and through political circles. One social media account posted an image of a staff listing for a woman they believed was a participant in the alleged affair.
“It’s really ridiculous that the only people who seemed to be showing some restraint are the people who would normally be jumping on these rumors like catnip, and that’s the press,” Belke said.
The restraint calculus changed when Heitkamp took to the air. Though she was forcibly retired from the Senate in 2018, both she and the venue through which she launched the rumor carried enough legitimacy for reporters to seek a response from Rosendale. When Rosendale publicly denied the rumor and threatened legal action against Heitkamp, and when Rosendale’s wife went on television to defend her husband, the rumor was transformed into a legitimate news story.
“It definitely was a coordinated kind of way to spread this,” according to Jessi Bennion, a political scientist at Montana State University in Bozeman who said she first heard the rumor almost as soon as Rosendale dropped out of the Senate race.
As both Belke and Bennion described the dynamic, it begins with a game of telephone initiated by someone with an interest in seeing the rumor spread. Calls and texts circulate in isolated groups in Helena and Washington. The story gets relayed on social media and in the bars, ballooning on people’s desire to be — or seem to be — in the know. The reach of the rumor becomes more important than its accuracy.
“People want to be able to walk in a bar in D.C. and say, ‘I worked a campaign with so and so and they told me this,’” Belke said.
Rosendale has made some enemies in Washington, as evidenced by the constant sniping between his camp and the GOP party establishment in the lead-up to Rosendale’s short-lived Senate campaign. At one point, a representative of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — a party organ led by Montana U.S. Senator Steve Daines — accused Rosendale of being a “plant” for Democrats. Democrats, for their part, had been salivating over the prospect of an ugly and mutually damaging Senate GOP primary between Belgrade businessman Tim Sheehy and Rosendale — a dogfight Dems were denied when Rosendale dropped out of the race. There are plenty of entities that might have benefited from — or at least enjoyed — making Rosendale squirm.
And Rosendale’s post-rumor political future was indeed unclear, at least until his House announcement Wednesday. As his decision was pending, more candidates were entering an already crowded Republican primary ostensibly to replace him, including former Montana Congressman Denny Rehberg. The rumor could, in theory, have swayed donors away from Rosendale, or otherwise muddied the presumptive advantages of Rosendale’s incumbency. By the time Rosendale announced his House re-election bid, many candidates who had earlier signaled deference to Rosendale had already begun campaigning.
The rumor, Belke said, may have “created a very contested, very expensive primary” for what had been expected to be an open seat.
At no point in the last two uncertain weeks did anyone produce any evidence of an affair, much less an affair with a staffer that led to a pregnancy. And the official explanation for Rosendale’s departure from the Senate race — that former President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Sheehy effectively foreclosed the possibility of an already far-from-certain victory — seemed to hold water.
Regardless, the reporting on Heitkamp’s claim only elevated the rumor’s profile. One account’s X post repeating the claim has garnered more than 51,000 likes.
Even one candidate for statewide office joined the speculative scrum, with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ryan Busse joking in a post that Rosendale would file for divorce.
“Officer class Dems are predisposed to believe accusations of sexual misconduct (no sexual crime has been alleged yet). They do not need proof to believe an accusation is true. Their attitude is ‘Where there’s smoke there must be fire,’” liberal blogger James Conner, who has criticized Democrats for repeating the rumor online, told MTFP in an email. “In this situation, I think that where there’s smoke there’s probably attempted political arson.”
By Thursday evening, Montanans had begun receiving anonymous polls asking whether they would support Rosendale’s House bid if he, for example, had an affair or was in an open marriage.
Contained in much of the rumor-mongering was gleeful contempt for Rosendale from his political opponents. Contained in almost none of it was any degree of regard for the young women described as co-conspirators in various versions of the rumor. (One exception is former Democratic state lawmaker Tom Winter, who excoriated Heitkamp and other Democrats for buying in to the rumor.)
“You’re holding two things at once,” Bennion said. “The biggest Senate race in Montana history in one hand, and you’re also holding the significance of an actual human being, a young woman who this is about.”
Congressional staff — often freshly minted political science grads in their early 20s — occupy a peculiar place in Washington.
“I was making less than my brother who worked for Home Depot,” Belke said of her time as a congressional staffer.
But despite low pay and recognition, their identities are wrapped up in those of their bosses, Belke said. So regardless of the truth or falsity of the rumors, the reputations of those employees can become collateral damage, especially in a comparatively small office like Rosendale’s.
“It’s something unique to politics,” Belke said. “You never get out from under the stain of the people you worked for.”
The bald truth about who began spreading the Rosendale rumor, and why, may never be known. The people who stand to be hurt by it, including but not limited to Matt Rosendale, are already well aware of the damage done.