Wendy Davis Dumped Her Husband As Soon As He Paid Off Her Student Loans [Report]

The background of Texas politician Wendy Davis as a struggling single mom is apparently not all what it seems.

Is Wendy Davis a fake feminist?

She has acknowledged that there are errors in the details of her biography according to a revealing report in the Dallas Morning News.

You may recall that Wendy Davis became a national media celebrity overnight when she filibustered an abortion bill in the Texas senate for about 11 hours last June. The bill that she spoke at length against, which bans non-medically necessary abortions in Texas after 20 weeks, became law in Texas anyway in July when it passed the legislature in a special session.

A conservative commenter got in hot water at the time for referring to Davis as an “abortion Barbie.” On the other hand, a fundraising group affiliated with her campaign was recently accused of making fun of her likely Republican general election opponent, Attorney General Greg Abbott, because he is disabled.

Based on all the national attention, the pro-choice Democrat who is currently a state senator from Ft. Worth is now running for governor of Texas. The worshipful media response to her filibuster contrasted sharply with what happened when Republican US Sen. Ted Cruz spoke for 21 hours in a long-shot attempt to defund Obamcare. His filibuster was widely mocked and denounced by most of the news media and even some members of his own party. In retrospect, the negative response to the Cruz talkathon is ironic given the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act and the delays in certain aspects of the law unilaterally made by the administration.

Some of the key facts of the Wendy Davis personal narrative have now been called into question:

Davis was 21, not 19, when she was divorced. She lived only a few months in the family mobile home while separated from her husband before moving into an apartment with her daughter. A single mother working two jobs, she met Jeff Davis, a lawyer 13 years older than her, married him and had a second daughter. He paid for her last two years at Texas Christian University and her time at Harvard Law School, and kept their two daughters while she was in Boston. When they divorced in 2005, he was granted parental custody, and the girls stayed with him. Wendy Davis was directed to pay child support.”

Davis left her husband — who in addition to taking care of the kids took out loans and cashed in his 401(k) to pay for her education — in November 2013:

Jeff Davis said that was right around the time the final payment on their Harvard Law School loan was due. ‘It was ironic,’ he said. ‘I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left.”

An unnamed colleague said this about Wendy Davis according to the same report:

Wendy is tremendously ambitious. She’s not going to let family or raising children or anything else get in her way.”

Thomas Lifson of the American Thinker offered an assessment of the Wendy Davis revelations:

“Davis has portrayed herself as a 19 year old single mother, following her divorce, but in fact, she was 21 years old at the time of the divorce. She testified under oath in a federal lawsuit to being 19, though, so perjury may be in play. But okay, perjury aside, shading two years off and making herself a minor is not that significant, but it is an indication that she plays fast and loose with the data in order to make her situation look more pathetic and desperate. Not a good sign, and not the most important lie. It is the lies by omission that are most important…”

Emily Zanotti of the Naked DC political website also weighed in on the apparent image vs. reality of Wendy Davis:

“… Wendy Davis’s decisions are hers to make, obviously, and all political candidates couch their personal histories in a light most favorable to whoring themselves out to people to whom they can no longer relate… But Wendy Davis has built her entire campaign on being a demi-goddess of women’s liberation, a self-made masterpiece of female empowerment looking to take women’s rights to the next level whether she has to do it in a pair of pink sneakers or a Reem Acra pantsuit. And yet, the missing details and contextual omissions are what ultimately tank her carefully crafted life story. At he core, she’s a woman in power because she used a man’s money and influence to get her there. A little cliche, maybe, but not really very inspiring.”

Do you think the national news media will cover this aspect of the Wendy Davis for Texas governor campaign?

[image credit: Kevin Sutherland]