Looking equal elements informal and cerebral, donning a tightly cropped beard, glasses, sweatpants, and socks, Andrew Gillum greeted me with a pleasant elbow bump. A good-looking, popular Black Southerner, the 41-year-old Gillum had risen regularly from metropolis commissioner to statewide candidate and celebrated resistance darling with a apparently unlimited future. Even after he misplaced the governor’s race, his identify was amongst the handful generally floated as a energy vice presidential pick. Then all of it got here crashing down.
On the morning of March 13, 2020, conservative activist Candace Owens was sent—she won’t say by who or how—a copy of a police report from an incident the evening time before. According to the document, an incapacitated Gillum had been realized by police in a Miami Beach lodge room with a male sex worker, baggies that the cops suspected contained crystal meth and assorted narcotics, and a third man, who had generally referred to as 911. Given the frivolity with which she believed President Trump and his spouse had been protected by the press, Owens later explained to me, “surely, anybody highlighted simply due to the actual fact the destiny of the Democrat Party at a drug-fueled sex get collectively with a male escort ought to rank somewhere close to important.”
So Owens, who has extra than 2.5 million Twitter followers, tweeted the police report. (The branch vowed to assess the leak of the doc but closed its probe after interviewing three officers and with out identifying a source.) Not lengthy after that, the Daily Mail revealed pictures taken by police on the scene; one other photo, revealed by a right-wing blog, confirmed a bare Gillum apparently handed out in his own vomit. On the identical day the coronavirus was first declared a nationwide emergency, the country’s higher headline for a variety of hours was Andrew Gillum.
“My brother is simply like, ‘What’s going on? You’re trending? You’re the quantity one trending factor inside the nation proper now,’ ” Andrew recalled. “I don’t know if you’ve viewed the news,” R. Jai informed her mom and brother. “Don’t watch it.”
The tale presented a salacious cocktail—drugs, attainable solicitation, and presumed infidelity. It was a scandal now not only about substances and sex but additionally about sexuality. Gillum withdrew from public life, releasing a statement and checking himself into alcoholism rehab. And six months later, in a September TV interview with Tamron Hall, Andrew revealed he's attracted to equally men and women—instantly making him in all probability essentially the foremost distinguished overtly bisexual man in American political history, at the identical time as it’s unclear what his destiny in government would possibly hold.
Beyond the expert implications got here the extra personal, or even extra difficult, familial fallout. The circumstances provoked questions about what, precisely, R. Jai had identified of her husband’s sex life. Left politely unsaid in public, but ever reward in gossipy whispers, was the principle that maybe the whole marriage had been a convenient cover. The fact was extra complicated: For no less than a 12 months earlier to that evening time in Miami, their partnership, crammed with galas and campaigns and occasions with the Obamas, had been crumbling.
Life as a public figure, a lot much less a political couple, requires picture management, and equally they and I knew that their participation in a profile offered them an street to no less than partially re-seize the narrative circular their relationship. “I generally feel, being married to an elected official or a public person, that the tales about him—he may possibly also be succesful to manipulate the narrative a bit bit bit, but ordinarily my tale is all of the time informed for me,” R. Jai explained at one point.
The Gillums stated that they had been prepared to speak concerning the incident in Miami—although they stopped engaging once I later attempted to verify the details—but had been also keen to speak concerning the tumult that preceded it and the rebuilding that followed. As we spoke that day in November, the Gillums informed the tale of a pair nonetheless very a lot in love, albeit nursing bruises, as they traded flirtatious barbs and lovingly cut off every one other’s anecdotes. They informed me that their marriage survived by way of the sort of work standard to any partnership that has navigated infidelity: hours of tearful talks, couples therapy, and a brand new protection of “radical honesty”—all of which occurred whereas that they had been constrained at home. There was nowhere to hide, which they now trust is exactly what they needed. “I assume that the pandemic apparently stored our marriage,” R. Jai informed me. “In the sense that we couldn’t go anywhere,” Andrew chimed in.
The tale of the Gillums began only a bunch of miles away, on the campus of the historically Black Florida A&M University, the place they equally served inside the pupil senate. As an ambitious freshman charged with overseeing senate decorum, Andrew approached R. Jai at a assembly to chide his destiny wife, a biology pupil NULL years his senior, for her skirt being too short.
The standard-issue black industry skirt in query had been purchased the earlier summer, after R. Jai had stored up sufficient funds to purchase it for an internship in San Francisco. “I went to Nordstrom,” R. Jai explained proudly. “I had by no means even heard of Nordstrom.” She continued: “Needless to say, we had been friends, but by no means dated in college.” “We weren’t friends,” her husband interjected. “We had been friendly,” R. Jai conceded.
After college, Andrew spent months failing to develop into extra than a friend: He got her quantity from a mutual acquaintance, but she by no means generally referred to as him back; he gave her his quantity after operating into her on the mall, but she by no means called. Finally that they had been arrange by pals at an FAMU tailgate, which ended in a good-bye kiss after a overdue evening time of conversation at Bennigan’s.
By then Andrew was a 24-year-old phenom: As a Tallahassee metropolis commissioner, he was one in all of the youngest Black politicians ever elected to public workplace in Florida. He’d long past from campus activist to metropolis official, with simply the proper blend of intelligence, ambition, and hobby to earn loyal supporters. Most in urban assumed he was eyeing the mayor’s office; he was also “one of Tallahassee’s most eligible bachelors,” recalled R. Jai, who had by then returned to FAMU for a master’s in well being policy.
The standing of their relationship oscillated on and stale for five years whereas they equally dated assorted people. By the time Andrew wished to get serious, R. Jai had damaged issues off altogether. She was a gubernatorial fellow with the state well being department, so Andrew confirmed up at her job, approaching her at an occasion on the governor’s mansion to plead for a threat to talk. Before lengthy that they had been once more collectively for good, and it was time for Andrew to monitor one thing predominant about himself.
Andrew had figured out as a baby that he was attracted to equally boys and girls. But once more then, pretty inside the churchgoing South, the principle of bisexuality wasn’t extensively mentioned as real. “As I understood it, it was simply gay men who had been attempting to cross in a heterosexual relationship when that wasn’t in reality what that they had been attracted to,” Andrew explained. “I nonetheless assume it’s very a lot misunderstood inside the Black community, that of us don’t in reality settle for that there can also just be bisexuality as an identity.”
Even today, Black male bisexuality is nonetheless predominantly discussed by way of the lens of “the down-low,” the stigmatized time period for men who hold a facade of heterosexuality whereas secretly sleeping with assorted men. It casts bisexuality as deceitful, even inherently shameful, which may in turn create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: When your id is viewed as false or deviant, preserving it to your self can in reality experience just like the one secure option.
It’s simple to think concerning the torment of navigating all of this as an adolescent. When Gillum was in 10th grade, a instructor assigned Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s agonizing account of a bisexual man who, quickly after providing to his girlfriend, reveals himself passionately entangled with an Italian bartender. “But of us can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they will invent their parents,” Baldwin’s protagonist relays inside the book’s early pages. “Life provides these and likewise takes them away and the vast trouble is to assert Yes to life.”
“I remember…getting totally caught emotionally, now not being succesful to treat it psychologically,” Andrew recalled to me. “I in reality didn’t stop up finishing the ebook at that time.” But inside the years since, he’d develop into extra delicate collectively with his sexuality, courting equally men and ladies in adulthood. He knew that if he wished R. Jai as a life partner, he’d needs to inform her.
R. Jai had also been raised inside the Southern Black Belt, although she’d grown up with a school health-education professor for a mom in a residence wherein sexual id was overtly discussed. Still, she admits, she had concerns.
“I had lots of questions, a few of which he can also just answer, a few of which he couldn’t,” R. Jai recalled. “But I guess maybe it was that trust in me in reality believing what he wished to assert about me and us [that] made it better.… It made me desire to no less than say, ‘Okay, let’s see. Let’s determine this factor out.’ ”
According to R. Jai, “What primarily concerned me, it was for me: What does this imply for our relationship? How does this work?” They decided that Andrew’s sexuality didn’t needs to imply a lot in any respect for them. It was section of who he was but didn’t imply that he wished to be with anybody else or beloved her any less. “Once we got earlier all that, nothing has replaced [from] the Andrew that I’ve dated on and stale for about six years, Andrew that I’ve identified as a pal for even longer,” she said. “So now I’m like, ‘We’re only a pair facing the identical issues that assorted of us deal with.’ There is nothing different.”
Yet there was one thing assorted concerning the Gillums: Their partnership was a public one. By the time they married in May 2009, Andrew had been an elected official for six years. They in brief judicious having him pop out publicly earlier than his 2014 Tallahassee mayoral run—Andrew stated he knew the reality that he had dated men inside the earlier may possibly also be revealed and thought sharing his private tale would guide his advocacy for marriage equality—but feared dropping what remained of their private lives and prompting public questioning about their marriage. “I had a political adviser whom I’d spoken to who was now not simply ‘No,’ but like, ‘Hell no!’ And Jai stated no too,” Andrew recalled. And so he continued his public life as presumptively straight, at the identical time as his emerging prominence quickly introduced waves of latest attention.
“A political consumer has his share of admirers, regardless of even if he’s married or not,” R. Jai informed me. “It’s like, well, apart from having ladies who're generally disrespectful, you now even have men?”
Though his political fortunes had been emerging in Florida, Andrew Gillum hadn’t deliberate to run for governor. He had spent the higher section of 2016 campaigning for Hillary Clinton and thought there may possibly also be a energy position in her administration for him. But Donald Trump’s victory replaced all that, and Gillum spotted an beginning for himself inside the 2018 race. With two-year-old twins at home, the Gillums assumed a crusade would positioned their plans for additional household expansion on hold. What they didn’t know as they first judicious a gubernatorial run inside the autumn of 2016 was that R. Jai was already pregnant with their third child. That intended they spent lots of the crusade apart, assorted than the month he took off from campaigning across a vital stretch of the race to be residence for his or her child’s birth.
“It created an indescribable quantity of pressure on our own life,” Andrew informed me. “We’ve got twins and a newborn, and she’s got a full-time job, and I’m operating circular the state for governor.”
The Gillums say their marriage turned mechanical: When he was home, his break day was spent primarily with the children, leaving little for them as a couple. After he pulled off an upset and won the primary, Andrew requested R. Jai if she would step clear of her activity on the Florida Dental Association and enroll in him complete time on the trail. She declined, short of to guard the individual id that her profession provided.
“I sort of packed it away,” Andrew stated of her decision. “Like, I stated it was okay. And it apparently wasn’t.” That frustration hardened into resentment after Andrew misplaced to Republican Ron DeSantis by simply 32,000 votes.
“You suffer the activity of all of the issues you can also just have finished differently,” he said, “and sinking deeper correct into a depression.”
For the primary time in practically 16 years, Andrew was now not an elected official—his mayoral gig ended simply days after he misplaced the governor’s race. Rather than absolutely activity the loss, he stored his schedule packed. He took a Harvard fellowship, released a statewide voter-mobilization effort, and accredited a slew of talking gigs. For the primary three months of 2019, he spent practically day by day on the road. That February, his father died suddenly. “I simply wished every one opportunity I can also just to escape,” he recalled. “And then the consuming got extra intense.”
It began with whiskey in his morning coffee; then he switched to a clean liquor whose odor was simpler to conceal from his wife. They’d all of the time been deliberate about drinking—Andrew’s father had struggled with alcoholism—but now he was quickly to order one other round. “Always the drinks had been too weak,” R. Jai recalled. “And you know, I lastly inform him, ‘Every bartender at every one occasion we visit isn't making you weak drinks. Something’s now not proper here.’” She requested that they soar couples therapy. He stated no.
“I in reality can’t say sufficient how a lot the rift was between us,” R. Jai informed me.
“I was finished asking you to come to cure with me. I had given up on you; you had given up on me,” she continued, addressing her husband. “I assume I had convinced myself ‘He wants help, I can't assist him, and he refuses to go get help. I’m out.’ And what does that appear like…? How can we make this amicable for our children? Because this isn't working for me.”
When the couple traveled to Atlanta in October for the release of Tyler Perry Studios, in all probability essentially the foremost Black-and-bougie occasion this edge of the Obama years, Andrew drank so a lot on the lodge bar beforehand that he began to nod off on the desk as dinner gave technique to a Mary J. Blige concert. “I can’t disguise him anymore simply due to the actual fact everybody from our desk has gotten as much as go dance,” R. Jai said. “And I’m literally standing in entrance of him attempting to make specific no individual can see him.” At one point, the Gillums said, Keshia Knight Pulliam tapped Andrew on the face and urged him to go get some coffee. R. Jai dragged him residence early, prompting a flurry of texts from pals about everything that they had been lacking on the party. She was furious. Andrew was hungover. “All I know was, I awakened the subsequent morning in my tuxedo, but I had a 6 a.m. hit for CNN,” he recalled. The lowest, most public level of the spiral was nonetheless months away.
Andrew stated that he spent most of the day of March 12 boozing on Miami Beach. He had a bunch of hours earlier than R. Jai and their pals would arrive on the area that they had all rented for a wedding, which Andrew was set to officiate. Eventually he wished to select up a apartment automobile from the airport, but rather he drank his method up and down the beach. At some level inside the early evening, he decided to connect up with Travis Dyson, then a 30-year-old nurse and sex worker, whom he stated he had met a pair of months prior. Andrew left the beach, took an Uber to the Mondrian South Beach, and went as much as room 1107.
“He deals me one thing to drink.… I’m now not in reality sure, like, what it's and what’s in it simply due to the actual fact I’m already sort of [drunk].… The final reminiscence that I even have is sitting up drinking,” Andrew recounted. “Because I didn’t take a drug experiment till NULL or three days later, I don’t know if there was one thing in my drink. But all I know is, I’m knocked out. At the level that I come once more present, it’s like 11 at evening time and I’m inside the bathroom. I don’t have any attire on. I even have no principle why. And I’m there with like five, six police officers.”
It was only later, Andrew said, that he saw the photograph of himself incapacitated. He insists he didn't knowingly devour medicine that night. “What I’m studying on this report is some tryst, some three people, this, that, and the third, and all of those are issues that I even have no recollection of. I by no means even met this third person,” Andrew said. “So at this level I’m like, ‘This is ready up.’ ”
Still, he said, he ought to have by no means been in that lodge room. “Me being and setting myself on this state of affairs to even speak with one other grownup at that degree was a mistake on my part,” Andrew informed me. “I’m an adult, and I know which you just don’t positioned your self in specific situations. And I nonetheless made options to lay myself in that.”
Andrew elaborated, his spouse watching on: “The non fidelis [unfaithful] section was I positioned myself in a state of affairs the place one thing can also just have happened, adding one thing that can also just have betrayed or would have betrayed my vows. And that’s the section that I wished to own outright. Because I knew that much. Given the state that I was in, I knew that a lot was possible.”
That’s the model the Gillums have shared publicly, insistent that no individual is owed additional explanation or details. And till now, Dyson—the assorted man inside the room—has declined to offer any confirmation or denial.
But once I later reached Dyson by phone, he informed a in reality assorted tale and maintained there was no setup. Although the Miami New Times reported that Dyson and Gillum had met the earlier spring, Dyson informed me the reporter had misunderstood him. In fact, Dyson said, the NULL first attached every week or NULL prior on the gay-dating app Grindr and inside the times since had met up varied instances for paid sexual encounters. He stated Andrew handed out after taking “G,” an ecstasy-type drug usually utilized by gay men to increase their sex drives, which when mixed with alcohol can knock of us out. He stated that on that evening time and others, equally he and Andrew used G and assorted drugs.
Dyson mentioned taking pictures and videos, and sending a few of them to friends, but stated he took them so as to be succesful to later reward Andrew what had happened. He stated he then took care of Andrew for a variety of hours earlier than accidentally overdosing himself. He stated the third man inside the police report, whom I can also just now not attain for comment, was one other shopper who had by no means met Andrew and generally referred to as 911 after displaying up for a separate appointment.
“Everything I did was attempting to assist Andrew,” insisted Dyson, who stated the incident has also scrambled his life: He and his fiancé separated, he was pressured to depart his graduate nursing program, and he now will pay the payments by promoting nudes and porn on OnlyFans.
How one in all of the pictures Dyson took that night, displaying a bare Andrew apparently handed out in his own vomit, ended up on a conservative political weblog is a saga of its own. Dyson keeps that he by no means gave it to the media. Enrique Tarrio, of Proud Boys infamy, informed me he began texting contacts in Miami after seeing information studies concerning the incident and earlier than lengthy had been despatched a screenshot of the photo. He then contacted Jacob Engels, a right-wing journalist in Florida, who revealed it on his blog. Tarrio—who currently denied a Reuters report that he was a federal and native police informant in Miami inside the early 2010s—and Engels wouldn’t monitor their supply but stated that to their wisdom Dyson was now not concerned instantly or indirectly of their acquiring it.
What exactly occurred that evening time stays unclear. After studying that I had contacted Dyson for comment, the Gillums canceled our scheduled follow-up interviews and declined to reply on the list to Dyson’s model of events.
As we spoke inside the dwelling room, Andrew recounted the incident in slow, deliberate sentences and stated he's nonetheless wrestling with its implications. He embarrassed his family. He reinforced misguided stereotypes of bisexuals. He shouldn’t have been in that room. And still, he believes, he was wronged. “All these pictures that I am now not conscious of, that I’m now not conscious of, that I didn’t give consent to, that I didn't take part in… To see what these issues have been finished circular you with out your wisdom or consent. And then at that level you soar to wonder, ‘What all happened? How did I get to this?’ ” Andrew informed me. “And you soar to in reality experience like one in all these of us who don’t have power, which isn't a fab place. Because even in bad decision-making, I desire to understand that I even have the power, the choice.”
Across urban that evening time in Miami, R. Jai and their pals had been emerging increasingly worried. For most of the day, their minds had been elsewhere—with the quantity of COVID-19 instances swiftly emerging across the U.S., the marriage ceremony ceremony ceremony venue had immediately canceled, leaving them with a 48-hour scramble to discover a brand new one. Andrew had been texting collectively with her across the day, but if she got to the apartment area that evening, she realized that he had by no means proven up. “I am considering that Andrew is somewhere drunk, and I am scared that he has both been arrested for a DUI or that he’s had a nasty accident,” she informed me. “I am sort of slowly dropping my shit.”
After a spherical of frantic telephone calls, she realized that he’d by no means looked at of his lodge room or picked up the apartment car. She assumed he’d taken a sleep and handed out for the night, and her fear turned to anger. She despatched a scathing text, took a Tylenol PM, and went to sleep. She awoke the subsequent morning to discover Andrew, who’d gotten to the Airbnb a bunch of hours earlier, pacing the entrance backyard on the phone. “He’s like, ‘I needs to inform you something.’ ” R. Jai recalled. “I am so burdened as it simply sounds like one thing out of a Lifetime movie. Police, O.D.? It simply doesn’t make any sense.” They talked on the trip to the airport to select up the apartment automobile Andrew had abandoned. As they pulled in, Owens’s tweet posted.
For the subsequent hour or so, the Gillums sat in a parking lot calling their families. He wished to get once more to Tallahassee. She insisted they now not abandon the wedding. “My life has come to a screeching halt, but one in all our very greatest pals says they’re now not going to get married until I marry them,” Andrew recalled.
Within hours, as conservative commentators hung out in his embarrassment, a bunch of Democrats, Black public officials, and former colleagues had been encasing Andrew in private support. His former CNN colleague Van Jones reached out earlier than they’d even left Miami and attached them with life teach Iyanla Vanzant. Tyler Perry volunteered as a prayer spouse and set them up with mythical disaster fixer Judy Smith, the inspiration for Scandal’s Olivia Pope. “As you know, I’ve been there,” Andrew says Bill Clinton informed him across a telephone check-in. “I know what it means to in reality experience at your lowest and make decisions at your lowest which you just don’t realize your self in.” Andrew’s wife, however, was much less soothing. “If you desire a preventing threat at your family,” R. Jai insisted, “you’ve got to get help.”
As Andrew went off to rehab, R. Jai took a depart from work to sort out homeschooling and think of her options. After considering by way of the occasions of the earlier year, she decided she was done. She began wondering the technique to make a divorce most amicable for the kids and rented an Airbnb apartment, now not sure who can be transferring into it as quickly as he returned from treatment.
“Neither one in all us ended up going, simply due to the actual fact as quickly as he got here back, I simply realized… I don’t desire to scare my kids,” she said. “Their dad has been long past for 40-something days, and I can’t simply leave. And then it simply turned ‘We may possibly also be civil and be pals and determine this out.’ And then it turned a ‘For now, I desire to battle for my marriage and so does he, so let’s simply do that.’ ”
The Gillums stated they began having a collection of tough conversations—he answered any and all questions she had about Miami; she confided that she’d began transferring funds correct into a separate account to practice for a divorce.
“He is going to cure on his own, I visit cure on my own, and we’ve had crew therapy, couples counseling. And it is, I assume for us, deep and intimate conversations that apparently would have as quickly as been super painful and tough to do,” R. Jai said. “We sold these relationship playing cards the place we simply ask every one assorted questions, and it’s been sort of cool to speak in a method that I assume is simply different.”
The Gillums are civilians now with civilian problems: which dad or mum is selecting up which kid from school, what to do concerning the range that went out simply days earlier than Thanksgiving, regardless of even if the native CVS nonetheless had Black Santas for sale.
But in fresh months, Andrew has begun to inch once more into public life. He released a podcast that positive aspects a standard segment by R. Jai and co-anchored election evening time protection for BET Digital. For the primary time in adulthood, he’s now not holding or flirting with public office, or constrained to a government salary. But he bristled when requested if he’s considering a return to electoral politics. “No, and that’s to now not say now not ever.… It doesn’t tug at me in that way.”
It’s an open query whether, after the 4 years of ethical shamelessness that was the Trump administration, the electorate nonetheless cares concerning the infidelities of its politicians. There’s in reality no loss of public figures who’ve been in a room with medicine or frequented sex workers. But no subject how far we’ve come from the America of Andrew’s boyhood, it stays to be viewed if we’re succesful of extending as a lot collective forgiveness to a bisexual lawmaker as to a straight one. And whether, so as to earn such forgiveness, Andrew would needs to remedy the actual disputes about what in reality occurred in that lodge room that night.
“Andrew and I would apparently be the primary experiment cases,” former congresswoman Katie Hill informed me. One of America’s few out bisexual politicians, Hill resigned from workplace in October 2019 after pictures of her bare and combing the hair of a lady crusade staffer with whom she was romantically concerned had been leaked.
Perhaps it’s now not stunning that in fresh months, Hill and Gillum have struck up a friendship: NULL emerging Democratic stars reduce by pictures depicting them in ill-advised and vulnerable moments. A younger, extra sexually figuring out generation of voters, Hill hopes, can also just eventually permit her or Andrew to once more search public office: “I desire to assume that it’s possible.”
Andrew isn’t talking about that yet, but he did perk up towards the stop of our interview once I informed maybe R. Jai would think of getting into politics.
“Oh, God no!” she blurted out. “Being married to Andrew and assembly a few of the superior elected officers that I’ve wished to meet, I assume I’ve viewed the lovely elements of of us who're political public servants—the public protection side, the of us who've the actual coronary center for it—but I’ve also had the misfortune of seeing the gruesome edge of politics. I simply don’t have the pores and pores and epidermis for it.”
“I assume she’s now not giving herself sufficient credit,” Andrew interjected. “It’s for assorted people,” she fired back. “You are special,” he replied with a smile.
Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who covers race and justice.
A model of this tale originally seemed inside the March 2021 trouble with the title "How a Politician’s Marriage Survives a Night of Scandal."
