GOP Rep. Joe Barton Announces Retirement After Explicit Photo Leaked

Texans ‘Lost Faith in Me’ Barton Says

U.S. Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) has just announced he will not seek re-election and will retire next year. The “family-values” lawmaker made the announcement in the wake of an explicit photo leaked online, showing him nude. He sent images, video, and messages to a woman he was in a relationship with, while still married to his second wife. 

“There are enough people who lost faith in me that it’s time to step aside and let there be a new voice for the 6th district in Washington, so I am not going to run for re-election,” Barton told The Dallas Morning News.

Barton supported the re-criminalization of sodomy in 2010.

The woman to whom he sent the images spoke to The Washington Post.

“It’s not normal for a member of Congress who runs on a GOP platform of family values and conservatism to be scouring the Internet looking for a new sexual liaison,” she said, explaining her motive for coming forward. 

The woman said Barton first reached out to her in 2011 after she posted a comment about politics on his Facebook page. As the two struck up a friendship, they would exchange messages for hours, including when he was on the House floor or in committee meetings, she said. 

Soon, Barton began flirting, making suggestive comments and sending explicit messages, she said. She described feeling uncomfortable with his advances at first.

“He says to me, ‘Do you want me to send you a picture of myself?’ I said, ‘Oh no, no. Please do not do that.’ It kind of started there,” she said.

Rep. Barton threatened the woman, saying he would contact the police if the images were used “in a way that would negatively affect my career.”

“In the 2015 phone call,” The Washington Post reported, “Barton confronted the woman over her communications with the other women, including her decision to share explicit materials he had sent. In that context, he mentioned the Capitol Police, a comment the woman interpreted as an attempt to intimidate her.”

“I want your word that this ends,” he said, according to the recording, adding: “I will be completely straight with you. I am ready if I have to, I don’t want to, but I should take all this crap to the Capitol Hill Police and have them launch an investigation. And if I do that, that hurts me potentially big time.”

“Why would you even say that to me?” the woman responded. “The Capitol Hill police? And what would you tell them, sir?”

Said Barton: “I would tell them that I had a three-year undercover relationship with you over the Internet that was heavily sexual and that I had met you twice while married and had sex with you on two different occasions and that I exchanged inappropriate photographs and videos with you that I wouldn’t like to be seen made public, that you still apparently had all of those and were in position to use them in a way that would negatively affect my career. That’s the truth.”

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Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license

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