Nikki Haley, Republican Presidential Candidate Secret Love Affairs with Two South Carolina Men Exposed while Married-Daily MAIL Newspaper
… Haley denied claims she cheated on her husband Michael before she became South Carolina governor in 2010 saying she was ‘100% faithful’
*Lovers: Communications consultant Will Folks, 49, and lobbyist Larry Marchant, 61, signed affidavits in 2010 alleging they had a sexual relationship with Haley-COURT Document
*”Representative Haley and I shared our first kiss while sitting in her parked car outside of MacDougal’s restaurant and bar in downtown Columbia, S.C. This kiss took place in early 2007 following an evening with friends at the nearby Liberty Taproom. After this first kiss, Rep. Haley drove us to the parking lot behind the neighborhood center at Emily Douglas Park where we parked for approximately forty-five minutes. There we slid back the seats of her Cadillac SUV so that Rep. Haley could climb on top of me. We engaged in an inappropriate physical relationship that included numerous instances of inappropriate sexual contact”-1st lover, Folks wrote in affidavit
*”In 2008, I had a one-night stand 2008 one-night stand with Representative Haley. After a night together of dinner and drinks with other participants of the conference, Representative Haley and I returned to the hotel together. We went back to her room where we had sexual intercourse and spent the remainder of the evening. I left her room at approximately 6 a.m”-2nd lover, Marchant in affidavit
*”We have booted out DailyMail.com journalists from our New Hampshire rally and informed the website that they’ll be banned from any and all our future events”-NIKKI HALEY’S Campaign respond
*”We stand by the integrity of our story. Nikki Haley gags DailyMail? Instead of issuing a furious denial, or, in fact, any comment at all, Haley responded with an illiberal, un-American tantrum. The question is- why not respond to DailyMail.com and refute the new claims?”-DAILY MAIL Editorial Management
*BY RICHARD BROWN/POLITICAL Correspondent, New Hampshire & SAMSON SHOAGA/GROUP Managing EDITOR, reporting LIVE in South Carolina
THIS IS SURELY A DIFFICULT TIME FOR NIKKI HALEY, A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE IN the on-going race to elect a final Presidential flagbearer to represent the GOP in the General Election scheduled for November 2024. Under Oath, in an affidavit deposed in court, two South Carolina men: Will Folks, 49, and lobbyist Larry Marchant, 61, had sworn they allegedly had sexual affair with the embattled former United Nations Ambassador.
Though Presidential candidate Haley falsely denied cheating on her husband when she was accused of engaging in two extramarital affairs during her gubernatorial campaign, multiple sources who worked with her claimed.
New witnesses have come forward telling DailyMail.com that Haley’s denials of two alleged 2008 affairs are false, and that the supposed trysts were brazen and widely known among South Carolina politicos.
Folks, 49, and Marchant, 61, both signed affidavits in 2010 alleging they had a sexual relationship with the then-South Carolina lawmaker, before she went on to become governor.
While the contents of the affidavits were described by major news outlets at the time, this is the first time they have been published outside of Folks’ own document which he published on his blog.
Haley, 52, denied both at the time, saying she was ‘100% faithful’ to the father of her two children and husband of 28 years, Michael Haley – who was deployed in Afghanistan with the National Guard in 2012. Haley now frequently cites him as a reason for her presidential candidacy.
But multiple GOP insiders told DailyMail.com that they were intimately aware of Haley’s infidelity as a South Carolina lawmaker – including tales of steamy liaisons in the back of her Cadillac SUV, ‘canoodling’ in her lovers’ laps at bars, and nights spent together in a Columbia, South Carolina duplex.
Haley has not responded to DailyMail’s request for comment as of the time of publication.
The news comes as Haley’s campaign gears up for the January 23 New Hampshire primary, a fight to regain second place in the race for Republican presidential nominee after Ron DeSantis secured a two-point margin over her with 21% of the vote in the Iowa caucuses on Monday.
Sources spoke to DailyMail.com about Haley’s alleged affairs after noticing her rosy references to her relationship with her husband, a major in the National Guard who is currently deployed in Africa, on her presidential campaign trail.
“I’m doing this for my husband and his military brothers and sisters. They need to know their sacrifice matters,’ she said in a speech reported by CBS News in December.
Her most recent campaign ad opens with photographs of Michael’s 2013 homecoming from his first deployment to Afghanistan.
Back in 2007, Folks was shaping Haley’s political message as her communications consultant while she served as a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives.
In a 2010 affidavit obtained by DailyMail.com, Folks stated that he and Haley ‘engaged in an inappropriate physical relationship that included numerous instances of inappropriate sexual contact”.
He said he first kissed Haley in a car in early 2007, and that he had regular trysts with her at his apartment in downtown Columbia. He got married in June 2008.
“Representative Haley and I shared our first kiss while sitting in her parked car outside of MacDougal’s restaurant and bar in downtown Columbia, S.C.,” Folks wrote in the October 2010 affidavit.
“This kiss took place in early 2007 following an evening with friends at the nearby Liberty Taproom. After this first kiss, Rep. Haley drove us to the parking lot behind the neighborhood center at Emily Douglas Park where we parked for approximately forty-five minutes. There we slid back the seats of her Cadillac SUV so that Rep. Haley could climb on top of me.”
Folks said that the alleged affair continued through Spring 2007, with trysts at his Columbia apartment, and that ‘a few other romantic encounters occurred in her SUV “including one in the parking lot of the S.C. Policy Council’ and ‘in her State House office”.
He wrote that he broke it off in June 2007 when he started dating the woman he went on to marry the following year, Katrina Steinborn.
Larry Marchant Jr., 61, a Columbia lobbyist, also wrote a sworn statement that year that he had dinner, drinks and sex with Haley in her hotel room at a Salt Lake City conference in June 2008.
At the time Haley’s two children, Rena and Nalin, were around 10 and 7.
“Rep. Nikki Haley and I were in Salt Lake City attending a conference together on June 14-15,2008,’ Marchant wrote in his affidavit. ‘We were both staying at the Salt Lake Marriott Downtown.
“After a night together of dinner and drinks with other participants of the conference, Rep. Haley and I returned to the hotel together. We went back to her room where we had sexual intercourse and I spent the remainder of the evening. I left her room at approximately 6:00 am.
“I came forward publicly on this matter only after being contacted by the press and after hearing Rep. Haley claim that she had been One Hundred Percent faithful to her husband in response to the Folk’s allegations when I knew her statements were absolutely false.”
Marchant, who was married at the time, divorced in 2013, with his wife citing the alleged Haley affair in court papers.
The Republican presidential candidate managed to successfully quash the allegations and avoid scandal-and ultimately went on to be elected governor in November 2010.
But one South Carolina GOP insider told DailyMail.com they knew about Haley’s alleged affair with Marchant at the time.
“She was in (Marchant’s) office all the time, she’d be there at 11 or midnight, the two of them would be drinking,” the former associate of Haley said.
The GOP insider said he had also seen Haley get into the back of her off-white Cadillac SUV with her other alleged beau, Folks.
“I saw them sitting in it a few times with the windows steamed up,” he said.
A second prominent South Carolina Republican said he regularly saw the distinctive Cadillac outside Folks’s duplex in Columbia, apparently staying overnight.
“I became curious when I saw an SUV parked outside early in the morning and late at night. It had legislative tags, it wasn’t hard to figure out whose it was,” he said.
He added that Haley was not secretive with her alleged romancing.
“A lot of people saw her sitting on laps, wrapped arm in arm. I saw her myself when she was sitting on Larry’s lap,” he claimed.
A third witness, one of Haley’s former campaign staffers, told DailyMail.com he had no doubt about the nature of her relationship with Folks and Marchant.
“When she was having the affairs, she and her husband were having a lot of problems and were on the verge of divorce,” the ex-staffer said.
“There’s no question she and Will were having an affair. Will was not sober at the time. They liked to drink at Za’s and Momo’s in Columbia. Nikki was a big wine drinker. They would sit and canoodle. It was totally out in the open, everyone in SC politics knew about it. I saw (Haley and Marchant) together many times.”
A fourth source, a senior political official in South Carolina, claimed Folks confessed to him he had sex with Haley in her car in a restaurant parking lot.
“In the South Carolina legislature, there are two types: the people who believe not enough gets done because there aren’t enough lawmakers and lobbyists sleeping together; and the people who are holier than thou and say that having an affair violates the Ten Commandments, “the political official said.
The claims of Haley’s infidelity were first splashed publicly during her campaign for governor in 2010.
Local paper the Free Times had been investigating Folks and Haley, and when its reporter questioned the male aide in May that year, he decided to preempt the story by admitting to an ‘inappropriate physical relationship’ on his blog, FITSNews.
Haley responded the same day, ‘categorically’ denying the allegations. “I have been 100% faithful to my husband throughout our 13 years of marriage,” she said in a statement.
She doubled down on a Columbia radio station, saying: “This claim against me is categorically and totally false,’ calling it ‘South Carolina politics at its worst.”
Folks, who had been a public supporter of her gubernatorial campaign, then posted text messages on his blog that purported to show others knew of the alleged affair.
The texts were between Folks, Haley’s then-Chief of Staff Tim Pearson, and Wesley Donehue, a consultant for one of her political opponents.
“I don’t give a f**k if you believe me or not. You’re the one who screwed her. You’re the one who bragged about it,” Donehue wrote to Folks in one of the purported texts.
Pearson encouraged Folks to deny the affair, allegedly writing that if they ‘keep this under wraps Haley is going to win.”
The following month, Marchant came forward with his claim of a 2008 one-night stand with Haley.
“After a night together of dinner and drinks with other participants of the conference, Representative Haley and I returned to the hotel together. We went back to her room where we had sexual intercourse and I spent the remainder of the evening. I left her room at approximately 6 a.m”, Marchant said.
At the time, Haley’s spokesman Pearson called the allegation a “false and outrageous desperate attack from a losing candidate’s paid campaign consultant in the final week of the race.”
Pearson was referencing the fact that Marchant had only just quit as then-Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer’s campaign against Haley in the gubernatorial Republican primary, after getting paid more than $50,000.
The scandal failed to suppress her campaign. Haley served as governor until 2017, when she became ambassador to the United Nations under the Trump administration.
The GOP insider marveled at Haley’s ability to shrug off the allegations, which would have killed many politicians’ bids-regardless of their veracity.
“She’s smart, an incredible operator, has a tremendous ability to put a force field around herself. She’s got an incredible ability to parry and power through bad press. She has the Southern charm of Bill Clinton and the ruthlessness of Richard Nixon, “he said.
Author Michael Wolff sparked unsubstantiated rumors of Haley having an affair with then-President Donald Trump in 2018, by writing in his book Fire and Fury that Trump ‘had been spending a notable amount of private time with Haley on Air Force One and was seen to be grooming her for a national political future.”
Haley called the rumors “disgusting and absolutely not true”, adding: “I have literally been on Air Force One once and there were several people in the room when I was there,” in comments to news site Politico’s Women Rule podcast at the time. Wolff offered no evidence for his claims.
In 2010 South Carolina political blogger Earl Capps also fanned flames about a rumored incident of ‘drunken sex’ with Haley – also unsubstantiated – when he conspicuously failed to deny them.
“I’m not going to admit or deny that one,” Capps told Folks’ political site FITSNews in September 2010, “I am not going to address those allegations at this time until I figure out what someone has gotten a hold of. That is my official position.”
No evidence emerged to back the rumors.
Nikki Haley gags DailyMail:
Nikki Haley holds herself up as the adult in the room-but from this journalist’s perspective, she appears to be nothing more than a petty, thin-skinned, petulant child.
Perhaps, worse.
On Friday, Haley’s campaign booted out DailyMail.com journalists from her New Hampshire rally-and then informed the website, one of the largest English-language online news outlets in the world-that they’ll be banned from any and all future events.
In the words of one of Haley’s campaign team: “We have booted out DailyMail.com journalists from our New Hampshire rally and informed the website that they’ll be banned from any and all our future events.”
The initial claims were based on the sworn affidavits of Folks and Marchant.
The two South Carolina men alleged to have had separate sexual relationships with Haley while she was a South Carolina state lawmaker and before she became governor of the Palmetto State in 2011.
The new reporting-based on the claims of multiple Republican Party sources ‘intimately aware’ of the allegations-is that Haley’s alleged infidelities were widely known inside South Carolina political circles.
So, this week, per good journalist practice, DailyMail.com contacted the Haley campaign and offered them an opportunity to comment.
But instead of issuing a furious denial, or, in fact, any comment at all, Haley responded with an illiberal, un-American tantrum. The question is-why not respond to DailyMail.com and refute the new claims?
Moreover, DailyMail.com is hardly hostile to Haley’s campaign.
On Wednesday, the site published an opinion piece by the beloved TV courtroom judge -Judge Judy.
‘It takes a lot for me to support any one candidate so strongly,’ wrote Judge Sheindlin. ‘But Nikki Haley’s integrity, intelligence, energy, and experience speak for themselves.’
Of course, one can see why the Governor would be personally discomfited by this reporting, but this unquestionably legitimate report cuts straight to the heart of Haley’s raison d’etre.
If proven true, the allegations undermine one of her key talking points – that her husband’s service in the South Carolina Army National Guard is a driving force behind her run.
‘I’m doing this for my husband and his military brothers and sisters. They need to know their sacrifice matters,’ Haley often says.
*Additional reports by DailyMail
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