A 26-year-old woman named Diana Andrade says that right-wing fraudsters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman paid her to accuse Dr. Anthony Fauci of sexual assault.
Dr. Fauci, of course, is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a notable member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force who actually contradicts the president’s numerous lies about COVID-19.
Around April 27, Andrade (using the name Diana Rodriguez) initially claimed that in 2014, when she was 20 years old, she met Fauci at the bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C.
“He looked rich and powerful, and I love smart men with grey hair,” she wrote. “He told me all about his fantastic career in medicine, so I went upstairs [to his room].”
After some sort of alleged “ineffective hotel bed wrestling” occurred, she claimed she managed “to flee with her honor intact,” adding, “Now, when I see him on TV touted as some kind of hero, I want the nation to know the truth. This is my truth. This is my story.”
Wohl and Burkman’s media wrangling to broadcast Rodriguez’s claims reeked of amateur hour, according to Reason writer Nancy Rommelmann:
The rollout of their latest smear job was a fiasco, a series of “media alerts” announcing press conferences with no start times, never mind that neither the public relations contact nor the company she worked for appeared to exist, and a “statement” from Rodriguez so breathless it seemed intended to steam up the windows […]
It was all in a league of its own weirdness, a collision of Harlequin romance and #MeToo. Nevertheless, several journalists called into a conference call to hear Rodriguez’s story. We were treated, instead, to Wohl and Burkman on the line, stating they’d on the fly been invited to represent Rodriguez, who haltingly told a story that varied significantly from the media alert and, when questioned for clarification, was talked over by Wohl.
However, 10 days after telling her story, she came clean and admitted the entire thing was made up after Wohl and Burkman paid her to fake a story.
“The reality is that I’ve known Jacob since 2018 and that he charmed me into taking money to do this (see attached picture of us together),” she wrote one journalist, sending a picture of her sitting on Wohl’s lap.
But even after Andrade blew the whistle on the fraudsters, the men just dug up a new fake victim named Karen Draper.
When Andrade asked Burkman why he was bothering to target Dr. Fauci anyway, Burkam reportedly answered, “Let me tell you something, Diana. This guy shut the country down. He put 40 million people out of work. In a situation like that, you have to make up whatever you have to make up to stop that train and that’s the way life works, OK? That’s the way it goes.”
This is Wohl and Burkman’s schtick: Find a progressive pubic figure who is potentially damaging to U.S. President Donald Trump and then hire some rando to accuse them of sexual assault.
It always blows up in Wohl’s and Burkman’s faces, but they keep doing it. They tried it with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, they tried it with former Democratic presidential candidates Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren. They’ve also failed at making other fraudulent claims against Joe Biden, Ilhan Omar, and Kamala Harris.
Not only are the fraudsters repeatedly mocked for their ineptitude, Wohl was especially derided after Twitter permanently banned him in February 2019. He’s a laughingstock and any case with his fingerprints on it is ripe for implosion.