Mike Durant has a lot of questions to answer, which might be why he hasn’t been taking many, nor showing up for forums, nor taking part in debates.
This isn’t a new phenomenon in Alabama. Debating is for losers. Just ask Kay Ivey, who won her last race without taking the debate stage once. Durant seems to be following the same playbook.
Which is a shame, because there’s a lot about Durant that the public needs to hear. And much he needs to answer for.
Like the stuff about his sister.
It’s an old story, litigated in civil court and reported by the Associated Press and other outlets in the 1990s, shortly after Durant returned home from Somalia where he had been held as a prisoner of war. But what happened with Durant’s sister is at least as important as the military service he showcases in his ads.
Durant’s father, Leon, molested Durant’s sister, Mary, for most of her childhood and almost daily when she was a teenager, according to a lawsuit she filed in 1994, but she had confronted her family and her father about it before filing the suit.
Durant asked his father to explain what had happened and the elder Durant confessed. Durant wrote letters to his sister in which he described confronting their father and their father’s confession. In those letters, he told his sister he was sorry for what happened.
“I picture you growing up and I wonder how anyone could do that to an innocent child,” Durant wrote in a letter later published by the AP. “I will never understand it. It makes me want to throw up.”
According to the AP reports, Mary said she would not prosecute or sue her father if he sought treatment for pedophilia and alcoholism, and her father initially agreed. But after her father failed to seek that treatment, she filed the civil suit. The statute of limitations had lapsed for criminal charges.
When Mary went public with her accusations through the lawsuit, Mike Durant strangely sided with his dad publicly and told the TV show “American Journal” that he didn’t believe his sister. She must have manufactured her memories, he said on the program in 1994, according to AP. The video is no longer available.
When I asked for comment, Durant’s campaign disputed that Durant told the TV show he didn’t believe his sister. Rather, the campaign says, Durant told the show he didn’t believe her when she first shared the allegations against their father, not later.
However, news reports from the time quote Durant saying things that don’t support that explanation.
“He was a good father,” Durant said on the show, according to AP. “I mean, he spanked us when we were little but he certainly didn’t abuse us. He’s not perfect but he’s certainly not the monster Mary is trying to paint him to be.”
And Durant framed his support of his father against his sister in the present tense, not the past.
“He has told me that the allegations are greatly exaggerated and I believe him,” he said on air in 1994. “He’s made some great effort to make things right. He paid for my sister’s therapy. He went to therapy. He admitted to having done some terrible things. He admitted to having a problem with alcoholism.”
After the show aired, Mary Durant shared the letters with the Associated Press. Those letters told a different story.
“He lowered his head, began to cry, and said it was all true,” Durant told his sister in the letter shared with AP. “I didn’t ask him he just told me. He does love you, but that is a disgusting way of showing it. I was trying to comfort him because I thought he might do something stupid. I told you that I didn’t think I’d ever be angry and I still don’t feel that. But the disgust and shame make up for it.”
When the AP reporter approached Durant with the letters soon after the show aired, he declined to explain. When asked whether he believed his father had abused his sister, he said, “That’s up to the courts.”
Mary Durant reached a confidential settlement with her father and Mike Durant does not appear to have spoken about the matter again.
At least until 2022 — 28 years later.
Earlier this year, an Alabama Political Reporter story unearthed the Durant family strife. Rather than explain why he called his sister a liar in the press in the 1990s when he seemed to know she was telling the truth, Durant attacked the media, crying “fake news” and calling the APR piece a “hack job” on behalf of his opponents.
“It has nothing to do with me as a person, nor was I involved,” Durant said to radio show host Dale Jackson last January.
Durant doesn’t seem to understand why anyone would think he did anything wrong. No one’s saying he had knowledge of his father’s abuse when it was happening. But after the fact, when his sister needed him by her side, Durant stuck up for his father, someone his own letters suggest he by then knew to be a child molester.
When asked by Jackson whether that was a reflection on his character, Durant characterized the question itself as an attack on his character.
And he responded by attacking his sister.
“It’s not me that’s estranged, it’s the entire family because of the things that she did,” Durant said. “Again, is it really relevant?”
The things that she did?
You’re darn right, it’s relevant.
And that’s only the first question Durant has to fear.
He has made comments that seem to show he supports gun control, which lots of Alabama Republicans take seriously.
He has told business supporters he supports legal immigration to grow the workforce, which makes sense to me, but Alabama Republicans who might disagree have a right to know that.
Debating might have fallen out of fashion with Republican frontrunners, but Alabamians deserve to see Durant answer these questions.
Because, how can he fight for Alabama if he can’t spar on stage with Britt or Brooks?
Heck, how can he defend Alabama, if he couldn’t stand up for his sister?
UPDATE: After being provided with seven specific questions by email last week, as requested by campaign advisor Scott Stone, the Durant campaign responded with the following statement after the column had been published: “This blatant character assassination on the part of career politicians is reprehensible. Kyle Whitmire is too busy carrying Katie Boyd Britt’s water to consider the fact that Mike Durant confronted his father, supported his sister and no amount of gonzo journalism will change that. It comes as no surprise that the media is going after conservative outsider Mike Durant, after members of the liberal media like Kyle spent the last 6 years attacking President Donald Trump while he was fighting to shake up the business per usual and take on the establishment in Washington.”
