As I hopped out of my rental on the last Tuesday of November, a smiling R. Jai shouted as I took a seat, prompting her husband, the man who in came 32, votes shy of running the state of Florida, out of an adjacent office.
Looking equal parts casual and cerebral, wearing a tightly cropped beard, glasses, sweatpants, and socks, Andrew Gillum greeted me with a friendly elbow bump. A good-looking, well-liked Black Southerner, the year-old Gillum had risen steadily from city commissioner to statewide candidate and celebrated resistance darling with a seemingly unlimited future. Then it all came crashing down. According to the document, an incapacitated Gillum had been found by police in a Miami Beach hotel room with a male sex worker, baggies that the cops suspected contained crystal meth and other narcotics, and a third man, who had called So Owens, who has more than 2.
The department vowed to investigate the leak of the document but closed its probe after interviewing three officers and without identifying a source. Not long after that, the Daily Mail published photos taken by police at the scene; another photo, published by a right-wing blog, showed a naked Gillum seemingly passed out in his own vomit. Jai told her mother and brother. The story presented a salacious cocktailβdrugs, possible solicitation, and presumed infidelity.
It was a scandal not only about substances and sex but also about sexuality. Gillum withdrew from public life, releasing a statement and checking himself into alcoholism rehab. Beyond the professional implications came the more personal, and even more difficult, familial fallout. The circumstances provoked questions about what, precisely, R. Left politely unsaid in public, but ever present in gossipy whispers, was the idea that perhaps the entire marriage had been a convenient cover.
The truth was more complicated: For at least a year prior to that night in Miami, their partnership, filled with galas and campaigns and events with the Obamas, had been crumbling. Life as a public figure, much less a political couple, requires image management, and both they and I knew that their participation in a profile provided them an avenue to at least partially re-seize the narrative around their relationship.
