Ben Stein, Potential Sugar Baby Have Page Six Fight

Former speechwriter for President Richard Nixon and iconically-voiced celebrity Ben Stein recently wrote a bizarre and rambling column about President Obama and Stein’s interest in younger, poorer women — and one of the two women about whom he wrote has decided to release the content of their communications to Page Six.

As far as sexting scandals go, Ben Stein’s is about as tame as he is — there is little salty language (the word “f***” is used once or twice) and so far as we know, no photos of anyone’s junk were exchanged.

The revelation is also mildly interesting (given the lengthy, filled with vague yearning column he recently published), as it seems Stein indeed was having a hard time keeping his baser urges in check, as he’d hinted.

Backing up to last month, Stein wrote in a column titled “BEN STEIN’S DIARY,” a post, “MAKING FRIENDS AND ENEMIES: Mr. Obama is simply AWOL,” which was published on American Spectator. In it, he described meeting two women — one of whom has since identified herself as a 24-year-old performance artist named Tanya Ma.

Stein refers to Ma as “Lucia,” and explains after meeting at an airport that she’d hoped for his… mentorship? It’s hard to parse, but Stein wrote:

“Specifically, she wants Ben Stein to help her become a writer. She wants an agent—bad news for her since my literary agent, Lois Wallace, just died. She wants me to teach her how to be famous and successful as a writer—as if I knew… it may be that the young woman has talent and will write beautiful prose about her compelling story. I hope she does. Certainly, she has interesting subject matter. Just today, I got a text from her saying that it so happens that she’s pregnant. She had been up in SFO having a romantic rendezvous with a young man, but she decided she didn’t like him and he didn’t like her. So they broke up. But, now she’s pregnant.”

Ma has since forwarded some of the texts between herself and Stein to the gossip column, saying that she didn’t “want him to continue to do this to women.”

She adds, “It’s much more than sexting, cyber-escorting or being a sugar daddy — it’s unhealthy and toxic behavior that needs to be exposed.”

In response, Stein commented on the texts the newspaper obtained, defending his requests for intimate contact with the woman as not inappropriate, and saying, “She is a person I have only met for less than five minutes at an airport. I have never touched her, I have never had any sexual contact with her. I should get a medal for helping this woman… This is a person who appealed to me for money. She said she would send me some examples of her performance art. Some of those examples were racy, and some were not.”

Stein added, “I just don’t get what I have done wrong. She is mad at me because she wanted more money… Here’s the real story: Ben Stein has never had any criminal charge or any ethical blemish in his life, she tells him a sob story, he helps her out to the amount of thousands, she said she’s going to have a baby and the father of the baby wasn’t going to help her out.”

“I didn’t expect anything from her. Hugging and kissing doesn’t mean I wanted to f*** her. I said that explicitly in my text… When is it wrong to hug people?”

You can read Ben Stein’s texts with Tanya Ma over on Page Six.

[Image: Tanya Ma]