With allegations of sexism and inappropriate talk with female employees swirling around Michael Bloomberg, past comments from another 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful are receiving a second look.
Bernie Sanders, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, vehemently denied being sexist after Elizabeth Warren said he questioned whether a woman could win the White House during a private meeting in 2018. He also rebutted her recollections of their conversation.
But the Vermont senator, 78, has a history of making unusual statements about women and sex, most notoriously in a graphic essay he penned in 1972, while he was in his 30s, in which he wrote that men fantasize about abusing women and women fantasize about being raped.
When the piece, titled “Man — and Woman” and published by the now-defunct Vermont Freeman, resurfaced during his 2016 presidential bid, he dismissed it as “very poorly written” satire on gender stereotypes from more than 40 years ago.
Yet in the intervening decades since the essay was published and his second run for the White House, Sanders has repeatedly made references to rape, although in different contexts.
In 1981, as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he compared the schooling system with rape because it led to a “death of the spirit” among his state’s younger members of the working class who seek an education, despite dwindling job opportunities, and eventually turn “to the abuse of alcohol and other drugs.”
“Day after day, in many ways, people who go to school are being raped,” he said during a 20-minute speech at the Vermont Solidarity Conference, a confab of political organizers and activists.
Nine years later, in 1990, when he was running for Vermont’s single congressional seat, he drew parallels between rape and the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, which at one time was estimated to require a $500 billion bailout package. When asked whether “the average American should bear some of the responsibility for having elected the president and Congress which helped create the scandal,” Sanders offered a sharp response.
“To blame Americans for the actions of Congress is to blame the rape victim for being raped,” he said, according to an article in The Brattleboro Reformer.
His statement irked at least two readers, who blasted it as “insensitive” to women because it “trivializes a serious crime” that should not be “denigrated or dismissed as anything less than what it is.”
The issue of gender has resurfaced at moments during the 2020 Democratic race for the White House after it was discussed at length during the 2016 cycle because of Hillary Clinton’s historic candidacy.
Bloomberg, 78, last week promised to release three women from their nondisclosure agreements if they wanted to publicly discuss their claims against him as the Super Tuesday contests on March 3 fast approach.
Bloomberg made the decision after fellow White House candidate Warren, 70, ripped him at the last debate in Nevada over “jokes” he had said to women, including suggesting a female employee “kill” her baby, and anecdotes of a sexist culture fostered at Bloomberg LP, his information services conglomerate. The former mayor of New York City and the Massachusetts senator are expected to rehash their disagreements during Tuesday night’s South Carolina debate.
Ahead of the debate, Bloomberg’s team has ramped up its attacks on Sanders, who it views as its chief rival to become the party’s next standard-bearer. One adviser for Bloomberg asserted Sanders once said “women get cancer from having too many orgasms or toddlers should run around naked and touch each other’s genitals to insulate themselves from porn.”
Amy Klobuchar, 59, also evoked gender on the Nevada debate stage after the Bloomberg campaign circulated a memo stating Sanders would be “impossible to stop” unless she and other center-left contenders dropped out.
“I’ve been told many times to wait my turn and to step aside. And I’m not going to do that now,” the Minnesota senator said.
