Today Gawker broke a story about Republican Representative Christopher Lee (NY-26). Lee answered a Craigslist ad from a woman looking for a date. He represented himself as a divorced lobbyist.
Rep. Christopher Lee is a married Republican congressman serving the 26th District of New York. But when he trolls Craigslist’s “Women Seeking Men” forum, he’s Christopher Lee, “divorced” “lobbyist” and “fit fun classy guy.” One object of his flirtation told us her story.
On the morning of Friday, January 14, a single 34-year-old woman put an ad in the “Women for Men” section of Craigslist personals. “Will someone prove to me not all CL men look like toads?” she asked, inviting “financially & emotionally secure” men to reply.
That afternoon, a man named Christopher Lee replied. He used a Gmail account that Rep. Christopher Lee has since confirmed to be his own. (It’s the same Gmail account that was associated with Lee’s personal Facebook account, which the Congressman deleted when we started asking questions.)
By email, Lee identified himself as a 39-year-old divorced lobbyist and sent a PG picture to the woman from the ad. (In fact, Lee is married and has one son with his wife. He’s also 46.)
NY-26 has an interesting history. It is the former district of Tom Reynolds, a Republican leader that helped cover up the Mark Foley scandal. Reynolds came very, very close to losing his job to crazy gazillionaire Jack Davis. Luckily for Reynolds, Davis was the world’s worst candidate and a big snowstorm allowed Reynolds to pretend he was useful. Lee took over the seat the next election when Reynolds retired.
The Lee story started taking off this afternoon. Lee announced his resignation, starting “immediately,” only 3 hours after the story broke. Twitter didnt even have time to come up with a funny nickname for him. I just wonder if there’s something else about to drop or if Lee has a history of cheating so his wife demanded he resign. Either way, there’s going to be a special election for the seat (R+6 district) and to make things extra fun there are rumors that Carl Paladino is being urged to run.