Mark Foley
In September 2006, Republican Florida Representative Mark Foley became a household name when sexually explicit instant messages and emails he had sent to underage male Congressional pages surfaced, including an invitation to a 17 year-old page to stay at the congressman's home in exchange for oral sex, and a request sent to another page for a photo of his erect penis. Once the scandal broke, many more pages from Foley's past ten years in Congress came forward, detailing a sordid history of similar conduct. Mark Foley then resigned from his seat in the House of Representatives. Read on for more.
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At least thirteen Republican Congressmen or congressional staffers acknowledged that they knew of the five initial e-mails before they were made public and did nothing, including Majority Leader John Boehner and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. As far back as 1996, Foley was widely regarded in Washington as having an eye for underage boys. According to Mark Beck-Heyman, who served as a Republican page in summer 1995, "Almost the first day I got there I was warned. It was no secret that Foley had a special interest in male pages." He alleged that many people on Capitol Hill, including Republican staffers, "have known for over 11 years about what was going on and chose to do nothing." Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, said on MSNBC that "I've had people now on staff that used to be pages, and it was widely known to watch out for him, that he liked boys ... so pages were warned to watch out for him."
Foley insisted that he was not a pedophile and that he had not "had contact" with a minor. This implied that though he did not sexually assault any male interns, he did not explicitly deny sending them solicitous and sexually overt text-messages; thus sidestepping the question of whether he should have apologized (in public or in private) to the interns who had complained about him. In early October 2006, two news organizations anonymously quoted two former pages who said that they had sexual liaisons with Foley after turning 18 and 21. An FBI investigation identified a pattern where Foley began courting the pages at age 16 or 17 but waited until they turned 18 to have sex.
Foley was chairman of theHouse Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, which introduced legislation targeting sexual predators and created stricter guidelines for tracking them. As an opponent of child pornography, He introduced a bill, coined the "Child Modeling Exploitation Prevention Act of 2002" to outlaw web sites featuring sexually suggestive images of preteen children, saying that "these websites are nothing more than a fix for pedophiles." Foley's legislation to change federal sex offender laws was supported by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, America's Most Wantedhost John Walsh and a number of victims' rights groups. President Bush signed it into law as part of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006.
While in Congress, Foley did vote against the proposed Constitutional Amendment to ban same-sex marriage and against a bill to ban homosexuals from adopting in Washington, DC. After the scandal, Foley admitted to being gay, despite for years deriding rumors to that effect as "revolting and unforgivable," and as of 2007 was publicly in a relationship with a man.
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