Former Mayor Andrew Gillum Found In Hotel Room With Bags Full Of Drugs
- Thread starter arnoldwsimmons
- Start date
That cracka XCactor acts like we don’t know about all the Republikkklan pedophiles and family value fags that get exposed. He’s such a pathetic right wing honky troll
Let’s let that shit go. Bruh ain’t did nothin to nobody.he didn't deny the shit.
What forums you be going to posting this shit here??? MODS!!!
I actually got the title off Facebook and that was the first thing that popped up off twitter.
Great broadcast as usual
I think most people of a certain status is gonna have a different opinion than others, anything from the mainstream on Andrew is gonna be with a bit of sympathy. Notice the youtube heads called it how they see it, dude is a gay, wife was looking to get her career popping, she married dude knowing he's gay but didn't care due to her dreams that she needed him to open the door to.
Mainstream is gonna have kiddy gloves, not to try to embrass dude too heavy, all understandable.
time stamped
WAB
Wet ass bussy
I heard one of the highlights of that Buck breaking documentary he's doing will be him finally coming out as a gay man himself.
Yeah he did. Trolling abs scrolling for *ags. . We know he’s on here.
This nigga Nasheed is constantly obsessed with some gay shit and he ain’t neva missed an opportunity to write the word bu**y.
time stamped
WAB
Wet ass bussy
Is this Gillum nigga wearing lipstick now? Goddamn AND niggas in here STILL “got his back”.
Duece was really defending BI’s
Former Mayor Andrew Gillum Found In Hotel Room With Bags Full Of Drugs
Former Mayor Andrew Gillum Found In Hotel Room With Fags Full Of Drugs
What a difference one letter can make...
Former Mayor Andrew Gillum Found In Hotel Room With Fags Full Of Drugs
What a difference one letter can make...
Last edited:
Is this Gillum nigga wearing lipstick now? Goddamn AND niggas in here STILL “got his back”.
If he's trying to do good for black folks, I'll support no matter what sexual or gender shit they have going on. Andrew Gillum seemed like a white washed token dude though. He had the black family, but all the other leisure pics of him were with white folks.
Interesting article, not done yet.... but still.... dude sat on this for a few months trying to clarify some points and seems to stay objective
Always a telling sign. I’m always suspicious of brothers with no black friends.
Russ wilson
RG3
That was a DEEP Fuckin' article.
Got to at least admire The Gillums for gaining control of the narrative.
Though a bit too late.
Gillum's future in Politics,
Especially as a Black Man who's also BiSexual
Is essentially toast.
I don't think it is.
No come backs
It's one thing to start out openly gay but another to get outed while posing with a beard and two kids. I'm thinking Gillum will always have a presence in the democratic party and will likely get a nice appointed position. I don't see him ever being elected again beyond the level of mayor. If he does he'll be the first high profile black man able to come back from a gay scandal. Usually we don't give second chances on closet crimes.
Last edited:
LOOOOT of caping in this story....
www.gq.com
How Andrew Gillum’s Marriage Survived a Night of Scandal
The rising Democratic star was found in a Miami Beach hotel with a male sex worker and suspected drugs. To keep their marriage together, he and his wife, R. Jai, had to embrace a new dynamic of “radical honesty” in their relationship.
Wesley Lowery
February 4, 2021 8:00 AM
Andrew and R. Jai Gillum
This story is part of GQ’s upcoming Modern Lovers issue.
It’s not hard to think that this Tallahassee house in a stately subdivision 20 minutes from the airport was built to be inhabited by a governor: two stories of regal brick canopied by a front yard full of tall trees, the worn basketball hoop at the edge of the long L-shaped driveway, the big white “G” hanging from the front door.
Of course, this isn’t the governor’s mansion. As I hopped out of my rental on the last Tuesday of November, a smiling R. Jai Gillum emerged from the garage to escort me, past halls covered in children’s drawings and glossy black-and-white family photos, to the living room. “Gillum!” R. Jai shouted as I took a seat, prompting her husband, the man who in 2018 came 32,000 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 41-year-old Gillum had risen steadily from city commissioner to statewide candidate and celebrated resistance darling with a seemingly unlimited future. Even after he lost the governor’s race, his name was among the handful frequently floated as a potential vice presidential pick. Then it all came 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 night before. 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 911. Given the frivolity with which she believed President Trump and his wife had been covered by the press, Owens later explained to me, “surely, someone highlighted as the future of the Democrat Party at a drug-fueled sex party with a male escort must rank somewhere near important.”
So Owens, who has more than 2.5 million Twitter followers, tweeted the police report. (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 Mailpublished 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. On the same day the coronavirus was first declared a national emergency, the country’s top headline for several hours was Andrew Gillum.
“My brother is just like, ‘What’s going on? You’re trending? You’re the number one trending thing in the country right now,’ ” Andrew recalled. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news,” R. Jai told her mother and brother. “Don’t watch it.”
The story presented a salacious cocktail—drugs, 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. And six months later, in a September TV interview with Tamron Hall, Andrew revealed he is attracted to both men and women—instantly making him the most prominent openly bisexual man in American political history, even as it’s unclear what his future in government might hold.
“I think that the pandemic probably saved our marriage.”
Beyond the professional implications came the more personal, and even more difficult, familial fallout. The circumstances provoked questions about what, precisely, R. Jai had known of her husband’s sex life. 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. “I sometimes feel, being married to an elected official or a public person, that the stories about him—he may be able to control the narrative a little bit, but typically my story is always told for me,” R. Jai explained at one point.
The Gillums said they were willing to discuss the incident in Miami—although they stopped participating when I later attempted to confirm the details—but were also eager to talk about the tumult that preceded it and the rebuilding that followed. As we spoke that day in November, the Gillums told the story of a couple still very much in love, albeit nursing bruises, as they traded flirtatious barbs and lovingly cut off each other’s anecdotes. They told me that their marriage survived through the kind of work familiar to any partnership that has navigated infidelity: hours of tearful talks, couples therapy, and a new policy of “radical honesty”—all of which occurred while they were confined at home. There was nowhere to hide, which they now believe is exactly what they needed. “I think that the pandemic probably saved our marriage,” R. Jai told me. “In the sense that we couldn’t go anywhere,” Andrew chimed in.
The story of the Gillums began just a few miles away, on the campus of the historically Black Florida A&M University, where they both served in the student senate. As an ambitious freshman charged with overseeing senate decorum, Andrew approached R. Jai at a meeting to chide his future wife, a biology student two years his senior, for her skirt being too short.
The standard-issue black business skirt in question had been purchased the previous summer, after R. Jai had saved up enough money to buy it for an internship in San Francisco. “I went to Nordstrom,” R. Jai explained proudly. “I had never even heard of Nordstrom.” She continued: “Needless to say, we were friends, but never dated in college.” “We weren’t friends,” her husband interjected. “We were friendly,” R. Jai conceded.
After college, Andrew spent months failing to become more than a friend: He got her number from a mutual acquaintance, but she never called him back; he gave her his number after running into her at the mall, but she never called. Finally they were set up by friends at an FAMU tailgate, which led to a goodbye kiss after a late night of conversation at Bennigan’s.
By then Andrew was a 24-year-old phenom: As a Tallahassee city commissioner, he was one of the youngest Black politicians ever elected to public office in Florida. He’d gone from campus activist to city official, with just the right mix of intelligence, ambition, and passion to earn loyal supporters. Most in town 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 health policy.
The status of their relationship oscillated on and off for five years while they both dated other people. By the time Andrew wanted to get serious, R. Jai had broken things off altogether. She was a gubernatorial fellow with the state health department, so Andrew showed up at her job, approaching her at an event at the governor’s mansion to plead for a chance to talk. Before long they were back together for good, and it was time for Andrew to reveal something important about himself.
“You start to wonder, ‘What all happened? How did I get to this?’
Andrew had figured out as a child that he was attracted to both boys and girls. But back then, especially in the churchgoing South, the concept of bisexuality wasn’t widely acknowledged as real. “As I understood it, it was basically gay men who were trying to pass in a heterosexual relationship when that wasn’t really what they were attracted to,” Andrew explained. “I still think it’s very much misunderstood within the Black community, that people don’t really accept that there is bisexuality as an identity.”
Even today, Black male bisexuality is still predominantly discussed through the lens of “the down-low,” the stigmatized term for men who maintain a facade of heterosexuality while secretly sleeping with other men. It casts bisexuality as deceitful, even inherently shameful, which can in turn create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: When your identity is seen as false or deviant, keeping it to yourself can feel like the only safe option.
It’s easy to imagine the torment of navigating all of this as an adolescent. When Gillum was in 10th grade, a teacher assigned Giovanni’s Room,James Baldwin’s agonizing account of a bisexual man who, soon after proposing to his girlfriend, finds himself passionately entangled with an Italian bartender. “But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents,” Baldwin’s protagonist relays in the book’s early pages. “Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
“I remember…getting completely stuck emotionally, not being able to deal with it psychologically,” Andrew recalled to me. “I actually didn’t end up finishing the book at that time.” But in the years since, he’d become more comfortable with his sexuality, dating both men and women in adulthood. He knew that if he wanted R. Jai as a life partner, he’d need to tell her.
R. Jai had also been raised in the Southern Black Belt, though she’d grown up with a college health-education professor for a mother in a home in which sexual identity was openly discussed. Still, she admits, she had concerns.
“I had a lot of questions, some of which he could answer, some of which he couldn’t,” R. Jai recalled. “But I guess maybe it was that confidence in me really believing what he had to say about me and us [that] made it better.… It made me want to at least say, ‘Okay, let’s see. Let’s figure this thing out.’ ”
According to R. Jai, “What mainly concerned me, it was for me: What does this mean for our relationship? How does this work?” They decided that Andrew’s sexuality didn’t have to mean much at all for them. It was part of who he was but didn’t mean that he wanted to be with anyone else or loved her any less. “Once we got past all that, nothing has changed [from] the Andrew that I’ve dated on and off for about six years, Andrew that I’ve known as a friend for even longer,” she said. “So now I’m like, ‘We’re just a couple dealing with the same things that other people deal with.’ There is nothing different.”
Yet there was something different about 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 briefly considered having him come out publicly before his 2014 Tallahassee mayoral run—Andrew said he knew the fact that he had dated men in the past could be revealed and thought sharing his personal story would aid his advocacy for marriage equality—but feared losing 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 not just ‘No,’ but like, ‘Hell no!’ And Jai said no too,” Andrew recalled. And so he continued his public life as presumptively straight, even as his growing prominence soon brought waves of new attention.
“A political person has his share of admirers, whether he’s married or not,” R. Jai told me. “It’s like, well, in addition to having women who are sometimes disrespectful, you now also have men?”
Though his political fortunes were rising in Florida, Andrew Gillum hadn’t planned to run for governor. He had spent the better part of 2016 campaigning for Hillary Clinton and thought there could be a potential role in her administration for him. But Donald Trump’s victory changed all that, and Gillum spotted an opening for himself in the 2018 race. With two-year-old twins at home, the Gillums assumed a campaign would put their plans for further family expansion on hold. What they didn’t know as they first considered a gubernatorial run in the fall of 2016 was that R. Jai was already pregnant with their third child. That meant they spent much of the campaign apart, other than the month he took off from campaigning during a crucial stretch of the race to be home for their child’s birth.
“It created an indescribable amount of stress on our own life,” Andrew told me. “We’ve got twins and a newborn, and she’s got a full-time job, and I’m running around the state for governor.”
The Gillums say their marriage became mechanical: When he was home, his time off was spent primarily with the children, leaving little for them as a couple. After he pulled off an upset and won the primary, Andrew asked R. Jai if she would step away from her job at the Florida Dental Association and join him full time on the trail. She declined, wanting to preserve the individual identity that her career provided.
“I kind of packed it away,” Andrew said of her decision. “Like, I said it was okay. And it probably wasn’t.” That frustration hardened into resentment after Andrew lost to Republican Ron DeSantis by just 32,000 votes.
“You go through the process of all the things you could have done differently,” he said, “and sinking deeper into a depression.”
For the first time in almost 16 years, Andrew was not an elected official—his mayoral gig ended just days after he lost the governor’s race. Rather than fully process the loss, he kept his schedule packed. He took a Harvard fellowship, launched a statewide voter-mobilization effort, and accepted a slew of speaking gigs. For the first three months of 2019, he spent nearly every day on the road. That February, his father died suddenly. “I just wanted every opportunity I could to escape,” he recalled. “And then the drinking got more intense.”
It started with whiskey in his morning coffee; then he switched to a clear liquor whose smell was easier to conceal from his wife. They’d always been deliberate about drinking—Andrew’s father had struggled with alcoholism—but now he was quick to order another round. “Always the drinks were too weak,” R. Jai recalled. “And you know, I finally tell him, ‘Every bartender at every event we go to is not making you weak drinks. Something’s not right here.’” She asked that they start couples therapy. He said no.
“I really can’t say enough how much the rift was between us,” R. Jai told me.
“I was done asking you to come to therapy with me. I had given up on you; you had given up on me,” she continued, addressing her husband. “I think I had convinced myself ‘He needs help, I cannot help him, and he refuses to go get help. I’m out.’ And what does that look like…? How do we make this amicable for our children? Because this is not working for me.”
When the couple traveled to Atlanta in October for the launch of Tyler Perry Studios, the most Black-and-bougie event this side of the Obama years, Andrew drank so much at the hotel bar beforehand that he began to fall asleep at the table as dinner gave way to a Mary J. Blige concert. “I can’t hide him anymore because everyone from our table has gotten up to go dance,” R. Jai said. “And I’m literally standing in front of him trying to make sure no one 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 home early, prompting a flurry of texts from friends about everything they were missing at the party. She was furious. Andrew was hungover. “All I know was, I woke up the next morning in my tuxedo, but I had a 6 a.m. hit for CNN,” he recalled. The lowest, most public point of the spiral was still months away.
Andrew said that he spent most of the day of March 12 boozing on Miami Beach. He had a few hours before R. Jai and their friends would arrive at the house they had all rented for a wedding, which Andrew was set to officiate. Eventually he needed to pick up a rental car from the airport, but instead he drank his way up and down the beach. At some point in the early evening, he decided to meet up with Travis Dyson, then a 30-year-old nurse and sex worker, whom he said he had met a couple of months prior. Andrew left the beach, took an Uber to the Mondrian South Beach, and went up to room 1107.
“He offers me something to drink.… I’m not really sure, like, what it is and what’s in it because I’m already kind of [drunk].… The last memory that I have is sitting up drinking,” Andrew recounted. “Because I didn’t take a drug test until two or three days later, I don’t know if there was something in my drink. But all I know is, I’m knocked out. At the point that I come back present, it’s like 11 at night and I’m in the bathroom. I don’t have any clothes on. I have no idea why. And I’m there with like five, six police officers.”
It was only later, Andrew said, that he saw the photo of himself incapacitated. He insists he did not knowingly consume drugs that night. “What I’m reading in this report is some tryst, some three people, this, that, and the third, and all of these are things that I have no recollection of. I never even met this third person,” Andrew said. “So at this point I’m like, ‘This is set up.’ ”
Still, he said, he should have never been in that hotel room. “Me being and putting myself in this situation to even communicate with another adult at that level was a mistake on my part,” Andrew told me. “I’m an adult, and I know that you don’t put yourself in certain situations. And I still made choices to put myself in that.”
Andrew elaborated, his wife looking on: “The non fidelis [unfaithful] part was I put myself in a situation where anything could have happened, including something that could have betrayed or would have betrayed my vows. And that’s the part that I wanted to own outright. Because I knew that much. Given the state that I was in, I knew that much was possible.”
That’s the version the Gillums have shared publicly, insistent that no one is owed further explanation or details. And until now, Dyson—the other man in the room—has declined to provide any confirmation or denial.
But when I later reached Dyson by phone, he told a very different story and maintained there was no setup. Although the Miami New Timesreported that Dyson and Gillum had met the previous spring, Dyson told me the reporter had misunderstood him. In fact, Dyson said, the two first connected a week or two prior on the gay-dating app Grindr and in the days since had met up multiple times for paid sexual encounters. He said Andrew passed out after taking “G,” an ecstasy-type drug often used by gay men to enhance their sex drives, which when combined with alcohol can knock people out. He said that on that night and others, both he and Andrew used G and other drugs.
Dyson acknowledged taking photos and videos, and sending some of them to friends, but said he took them in order to be able to later show Andrew what had happened. He said he then took care of Andrew for several hours before accidentally overdosing himself. He said the third man in the police report, whom I could not reach for comment, was another client who had never met Andrew and called 911 after showing up for a separate appointment.
“Everything I did was trying to help Andrew,” insisted Dyson, who said the incident has also scrambled his life: He and his fiancé separated, he was forced to leave his graduate nursing program, and he now pays the bills by selling nudes and porn on OnlyFans.
How one of the photos Dyson took that night, showing a naked Andrew seemingly passed out in his own vomit, ended up on a conservative political blog is a saga of its own. Dyson maintains that he never gave it to the media. Enrique Tarrio, of Proud Boys infamy, told me he began texting contacts in Miami after seeing news reports about the incident and before long had been sent a screenshot of the photo. He then contacted Jacob Engels, a right-wing journalist in Florida, who published it on his blog. Tarrio—who recently denied a Reuters report that he was a federal and local police informant in Miami in the early 2010s—and Engels wouldn’t reveal their source but said that to their knowledge Dyson was not involved directly or indirectly in their acquiring it.
What precisely happened that night remains unclear. After learning that I had contacted Dyson for comment, the Gillums canceled our scheduled follow-up interviews and declined to respond on the record to Dyson’s version of events.
As we spoke in the living room, Andrew recounted the incident in slow, deliberate sentences and said he is still 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 images that I am not aware of, that I’m not conscious of, that I didn’t give consent to, that I did not participate in… To see what these things have been done around you without your knowledge or consent. And then at that point you start to wonder, ‘What all happened? How did I get to this?’ ” Andrew told me. “And you start to feel like one of those people who don’t have power, which is not a cool place. Because even in bad decision-making, I want to know that I have the power, the choice.”
Across town that night in Miami, R. Jai and their friends were growing increasingly worried. For most of the day, their minds had been elsewhere—with the number of COVID-19 cases rapidly rising throughout the U.S., the wedding venue had abruptly canceled, leaving them with a 48-hour scramble to find a new one. Andrew had been texting with her throughout the day, but when she got to the rental house that evening, she discovered that he had never shown up. “I am thinking that Andrew is somewhere drunk, and I am scared that he has either been arrested for a DUI or that he’s had a bad accident,” she told me. “I am kind of slowly losing my shit.”
After a round of frantic phone calls, she discovered that he’d never checked out of his hotel room or picked up the rental car. She assumed he’d taken a nap and passed out for the night, and her worry turned to anger. She sent a scathing text, took a Tylenol PM, and went to sleep. She awoke the next morning to find Andrew, who’d gotten to the Airbnb a few hours earlier, pacing the front yard on the phone. “He’s like, ‘I need to tell you something.’ ” R. Jai recalled. “I am so confused because it just sounds like something out of a Lifetime movie. Police, O.D.? It just doesn’t make any sense.” They talked on the ride to the airport to pick up the rental car Andrew had abandoned. As they pulled in, Owens’s tweet posted.
For the next hour or so, the Gillums sat in a parking lot calling their families. He wanted to get back to Tallahassee. She insisted they not abandon the wedding. “My life has come to a screeching halt, but one of our very best friends says they’re not going to get married unless I marry them,” Andrew recalled.
Within hours, as conservative commentators frolicked in his embarrassment, a number of Democrats, Black public officials, and former colleagues were encasing Andrew in private support. His former CNN colleague Van Jones reached out before they’d even left Miami and connected them with life coach Iyanla Vanzant. Tyler Perry volunteered as a prayer partner and set them up with legendary crisis fixer Judy Smith, the inspiration for Scandal’s Olivia Pope. “As you know, I’ve been there,” Andrew says Bill Clinton told him during a phone check-in. “I know what it means to feel at your lowest and make decisions at your lowest that you don’t recognize yourself in.” Andrew’s wife, however, was less soothing. “If you want a fighting chance at your family,” R. Jai insisted, “you’ve got to get help.”
As Andrew went off to rehab, R. Jai took a leave from work to sort out homeschooling and consider her options. After thinking through the events of the past year, she decided she was done. She began wondering how to make a divorce most amicable for the children and rented an Airbnb apartment, unsure who would be moving into it once he returned from treatment.
“Neither one of us ended up going, because as soon as he came back, I just realized… I don’t want to scare my kids,” she said. “Their dad has been gone for 40-something days, and I can’t just leave. And then it just became ‘We can be civil and be friends and figure this out.’ And then it became a ‘For now, I want to fight for my marriage and so does he, so let’s just do that.’ ”
The Gillums said they began having a series of difficult conversations—he answered any and all questions she had about Miami; she confided that she’d started moving money into a separate account to prepare for a divorce.
“He goes to therapy on his own, I go to therapy on my own, and we’ve had group therapy, couples counseling. And it is, I think for us, deep and intimate conversations that probably would have once been extremely painful and hard to do,” R. Jai said. “We bought these relationship cards where we just ask each other questions, and it’s been kind of cool to talk in a way that I think is just different.”
The Gillums are civilians now with civilian problems: which parent is picking up which kid from school, what to do about the stove that went out just days before Thanksgiving, whether the local CVS still had Black Santas for sale.
But in recent months, Andrew has begun to inch back into public life. He launched a podcast that features a regular segment by R. Jai and co-anchored election night coverage for BET Digital. For the first time in adulthood, he’s not holding or flirting with public office, or confined to a government salary. But he bristled when asked if he’s considering a return to electoral politics. “No, and that’s not to say not ever.… It doesn’t tug at me in that way.”
It’s an open question whether, after the four years of moral shamelessness that was the Trump administration, the electorate still cares about the infidelities of its politicians. There’s certainly no lack of public figures who’ve been in a room with drugs or frequented sex workers. But no matter how far we’ve come from the America of Andrew’s boyhood, it remains to be seen if we’re capable of extending as much collective forgiveness to a bisexual lawmaker as to a straight one. And whether, in order to earn such forgiveness, Andrew would need to resolve the factual disputes about what actually happened in that hotel room that night.
“Andrew and I would probably be the first test cases,” former congresswoman Katie Hill told me. One of America’s few out bisexual politicians, Hill resigned from office in October 2019 after photos of her naked and combing the hair of a female campaign staffer with whom she was romantically involved were leaked.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that in recent months, Hill and Gillum have struck up a friendship: two rising Democratic stars cut down by images depicting them in ill-advised and vulnerable moments. A younger, more sexually understanding generation of voters, Hill hopes, may eventually enable her or Andrew to again seek public office: “I like to think that it’s possible.”
Andrew isn’t talking about that yet, but he did perk up toward the end of our interview when I suggested perhaps R. Jai would consider entering politics.
“Oh, God no!” she blurted out. “Being married to Andrew and meeting some of the awesome elected officials that I’ve had to meet, I think I’ve seen the beautiful parts of people who are political public servants—the public policy side, the people who have the true heart for it—but I’ve also had the misfortune of seeing the ugly side of politics. I just don’t have the skin for it.”
“I think she’s not giving herself enough credit,” Andrew interjected. “It’s for special 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 version of this story originally appeared in the March 2021 issue with the title "How a Politician’s Marriage Survives a Night of Scandal."
How Andrew Gillum’s Marriage Survived a Night of Scandal
The rising Democratic star was found in a Miami Beach hotel with a male sex worker and suspected drugs. To keep their marriage together, he and his wife, R. Jai, had to embrace a new dynamic of “radical honesty” in their relationship.
How Andrew Gillum’s Marriage Survived a Night of Scandal
The rising Democratic star was found in a Miami Beach hotel with a male sex worker and suspected drugs. To keep their marriage together, he and his wife, R. Jai, had to embrace a new dynamic of “radical honesty” in their relationship.
Wesley Lowery
February 4, 2021 8:00 AM
Andrew and R. Jai Gillum
This story is part of GQ’s upcoming Modern Lovers issue.
It’s not hard to think that this Tallahassee house in a stately subdivision 20 minutes from the airport was built to be inhabited by a governor: two stories of regal brick canopied by a front yard full of tall trees, the worn basketball hoop at the edge of the long L-shaped driveway, the big white “G” hanging from the front door.
Of course, this isn’t the governor’s mansion. As I hopped out of my rental on the last Tuesday of November, a smiling R. Jai Gillum emerged from the garage to escort me, past halls covered in children’s drawings and glossy black-and-white family photos, to the living room. “Gillum!” R. Jai shouted as I took a seat, prompting her husband, the man who in 2018 came 32,000 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 41-year-old Gillum had risen steadily from city commissioner to statewide candidate and celebrated resistance darling with a seemingly unlimited future. Even after he lost the governor’s race, his name was among the handful frequently floated as a potential vice presidential pick. Then it all came 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 night before. 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 911. Given the frivolity with which she believed President Trump and his wife had been covered by the press, Owens later explained to me, “surely, someone highlighted as the future of the Democrat Party at a drug-fueled sex party with a male escort must rank somewhere near important.”
So Owens, who has more than 2.5 million Twitter followers, tweeted the police report. (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 Mailpublished 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. On the same day the coronavirus was first declared a national emergency, the country’s top headline for several hours was Andrew Gillum.
“My brother is just like, ‘What’s going on? You’re trending? You’re the number one trending thing in the country right now,’ ” Andrew recalled. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news,” R. Jai told her mother and brother. “Don’t watch it.”
The story presented a salacious cocktail—drugs, 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. And six months later, in a September TV interview with Tamron Hall, Andrew revealed he is attracted to both men and women—instantly making him the most prominent openly bisexual man in American political history, even as it’s unclear what his future in government might hold.
“I think that the pandemic probably saved our marriage.”
Beyond the professional implications came the more personal, and even more difficult, familial fallout. The circumstances provoked questions about what, precisely, R. Jai had known of her husband’s sex life. 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. “I sometimes feel, being married to an elected official or a public person, that the stories about him—he may be able to control the narrative a little bit, but typically my story is always told for me,” R. Jai explained at one point.
The Gillums said they were willing to discuss the incident in Miami—although they stopped participating when I later attempted to confirm the details—but were also eager to talk about the tumult that preceded it and the rebuilding that followed. As we spoke that day in November, the Gillums told the story of a couple still very much in love, albeit nursing bruises, as they traded flirtatious barbs and lovingly cut off each other’s anecdotes. They told me that their marriage survived through the kind of work familiar to any partnership that has navigated infidelity: hours of tearful talks, couples therapy, and a new policy of “radical honesty”—all of which occurred while they were confined at home. There was nowhere to hide, which they now believe is exactly what they needed. “I think that the pandemic probably saved our marriage,” R. Jai told me. “In the sense that we couldn’t go anywhere,” Andrew chimed in.
The story of the Gillums began just a few miles away, on the campus of the historically Black Florida A&M University, where they both served in the student senate. As an ambitious freshman charged with overseeing senate decorum, Andrew approached R. Jai at a meeting to chide his future wife, a biology student two years his senior, for her skirt being too short.
The standard-issue black business skirt in question had been purchased the previous summer, after R. Jai had saved up enough money to buy it for an internship in San Francisco. “I went to Nordstrom,” R. Jai explained proudly. “I had never even heard of Nordstrom.” She continued: “Needless to say, we were friends, but never dated in college.” “We weren’t friends,” her husband interjected. “We were friendly,” R. Jai conceded.
After college, Andrew spent months failing to become more than a friend: He got her number from a mutual acquaintance, but she never called him back; he gave her his number after running into her at the mall, but she never called. Finally they were set up by friends at an FAMU tailgate, which led to a goodbye kiss after a late night of conversation at Bennigan’s.
By then Andrew was a 24-year-old phenom: As a Tallahassee city commissioner, he was one of the youngest Black politicians ever elected to public office in Florida. He’d gone from campus activist to city official, with just the right mix of intelligence, ambition, and passion to earn loyal supporters. Most in town 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 health policy.
The status of their relationship oscillated on and off for five years while they both dated other people. By the time Andrew wanted to get serious, R. Jai had broken things off altogether. She was a gubernatorial fellow with the state health department, so Andrew showed up at her job, approaching her at an event at the governor’s mansion to plead for a chance to talk. Before long they were back together for good, and it was time for Andrew to reveal something important about himself.
“You start to wonder, ‘What all happened? How did I get to this?’
Andrew had figured out as a child that he was attracted to both boys and girls. But back then, especially in the churchgoing South, the concept of bisexuality wasn’t widely acknowledged as real. “As I understood it, it was basically gay men who were trying to pass in a heterosexual relationship when that wasn’t really what they were attracted to,” Andrew explained. “I still think it’s very much misunderstood within the Black community, that people don’t really accept that there is bisexuality as an identity.”
Even today, Black male bisexuality is still predominantly discussed through the lens of “the down-low,” the stigmatized term for men who maintain a facade of heterosexuality while secretly sleeping with other men. It casts bisexuality as deceitful, even inherently shameful, which can in turn create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: When your identity is seen as false or deviant, keeping it to yourself can feel like the only safe option.
It’s easy to imagine the torment of navigating all of this as an adolescent. When Gillum was in 10th grade, a teacher assigned Giovanni’s Room,James Baldwin’s agonizing account of a bisexual man who, soon after proposing to his girlfriend, finds himself passionately entangled with an Italian bartender. “But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents,” Baldwin’s protagonist relays in the book’s early pages. “Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
“I remember…getting completely stuck emotionally, not being able to deal with it psychologically,” Andrew recalled to me. “I actually didn’t end up finishing the book at that time.” But in the years since, he’d become more comfortable with his sexuality, dating both men and women in adulthood. He knew that if he wanted R. Jai as a life partner, he’d need to tell her.
R. Jai had also been raised in the Southern Black Belt, though she’d grown up with a college health-education professor for a mother in a home in which sexual identity was openly discussed. Still, she admits, she had concerns.
“I had a lot of questions, some of which he could answer, some of which he couldn’t,” R. Jai recalled. “But I guess maybe it was that confidence in me really believing what he had to say about me and us [that] made it better.… It made me want to at least say, ‘Okay, let’s see. Let’s figure this thing out.’ ”
According to R. Jai, “What mainly concerned me, it was for me: What does this mean for our relationship? How does this work?” They decided that Andrew’s sexuality didn’t have to mean much at all for them. It was part of who he was but didn’t mean that he wanted to be with anyone else or loved her any less. “Once we got past all that, nothing has changed [from] the Andrew that I’ve dated on and off for about six years, Andrew that I’ve known as a friend for even longer,” she said. “So now I’m like, ‘We’re just a couple dealing with the same things that other people deal with.’ There is nothing different.”
Yet there was something different about 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 briefly considered having him come out publicly before his 2014 Tallahassee mayoral run—Andrew said he knew the fact that he had dated men in the past could be revealed and thought sharing his personal story would aid his advocacy for marriage equality—but feared losing 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 not just ‘No,’ but like, ‘Hell no!’ And Jai said no too,” Andrew recalled. And so he continued his public life as presumptively straight, even as his growing prominence soon brought waves of new attention.
“A political person has his share of admirers, whether he’s married or not,” R. Jai told me. “It’s like, well, in addition to having women who are sometimes disrespectful, you now also have men?”
Though his political fortunes were rising in Florida, Andrew Gillum hadn’t planned to run for governor. He had spent the better part of 2016 campaigning for Hillary Clinton and thought there could be a potential role in her administration for him. But Donald Trump’s victory changed all that, and Gillum spotted an opening for himself in the 2018 race. With two-year-old twins at home, the Gillums assumed a campaign would put their plans for further family expansion on hold. What they didn’t know as they first considered a gubernatorial run in the fall of 2016 was that R. Jai was already pregnant with their third child. That meant they spent much of the campaign apart, other than the month he took off from campaigning during a crucial stretch of the race to be home for their child’s birth.
“It created an indescribable amount of stress on our own life,” Andrew told me. “We’ve got twins and a newborn, and she’s got a full-time job, and I’m running around the state for governor.”
The Gillums say their marriage became mechanical: When he was home, his time off was spent primarily with the children, leaving little for them as a couple. After he pulled off an upset and won the primary, Andrew asked R. Jai if she would step away from her job at the Florida Dental Association and join him full time on the trail. She declined, wanting to preserve the individual identity that her career provided.
“I kind of packed it away,” Andrew said of her decision. “Like, I said it was okay. And it probably wasn’t.” That frustration hardened into resentment after Andrew lost to Republican Ron DeSantis by just 32,000 votes.
“You go through the process of all the things you could have done differently,” he said, “and sinking deeper into a depression.”
For the first time in almost 16 years, Andrew was not an elected official—his mayoral gig ended just days after he lost the governor’s race. Rather than fully process the loss, he kept his schedule packed. He took a Harvard fellowship, launched a statewide voter-mobilization effort, and accepted a slew of speaking gigs. For the first three months of 2019, he spent nearly every day on the road. That February, his father died suddenly. “I just wanted every opportunity I could to escape,” he recalled. “And then the drinking got more intense.”
It started with whiskey in his morning coffee; then he switched to a clear liquor whose smell was easier to conceal from his wife. They’d always been deliberate about drinking—Andrew’s father had struggled with alcoholism—but now he was quick to order another round. “Always the drinks were too weak,” R. Jai recalled. “And you know, I finally tell him, ‘Every bartender at every event we go to is not making you weak drinks. Something’s not right here.’” She asked that they start couples therapy. He said no.
“I really can’t say enough how much the rift was between us,” R. Jai told me.
“I was done asking you to come to therapy with me. I had given up on you; you had given up on me,” she continued, addressing her husband. “I think I had convinced myself ‘He needs help, I cannot help him, and he refuses to go get help. I’m out.’ And what does that look like…? How do we make this amicable for our children? Because this is not working for me.”
When the couple traveled to Atlanta in October for the launch of Tyler Perry Studios, the most Black-and-bougie event this side of the Obama years, Andrew drank so much at the hotel bar beforehand that he began to fall asleep at the table as dinner gave way to a Mary J. Blige concert. “I can’t hide him anymore because everyone from our table has gotten up to go dance,” R. Jai said. “And I’m literally standing in front of him trying to make sure no one 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 home early, prompting a flurry of texts from friends about everything they were missing at the party. She was furious. Andrew was hungover. “All I know was, I woke up the next morning in my tuxedo, but I had a 6 a.m. hit for CNN,” he recalled. The lowest, most public point of the spiral was still months away.
Andrew said that he spent most of the day of March 12 boozing on Miami Beach. He had a few hours before R. Jai and their friends would arrive at the house they had all rented for a wedding, which Andrew was set to officiate. Eventually he needed to pick up a rental car from the airport, but instead he drank his way up and down the beach. At some point in the early evening, he decided to meet up with Travis Dyson, then a 30-year-old nurse and sex worker, whom he said he had met a couple of months prior. Andrew left the beach, took an Uber to the Mondrian South Beach, and went up to room 1107.
“He offers me something to drink.… I’m not really sure, like, what it is and what’s in it because I’m already kind of [drunk].… The last memory that I have is sitting up drinking,” Andrew recounted. “Because I didn’t take a drug test until two or three days later, I don’t know if there was something in my drink. But all I know is, I’m knocked out. At the point that I come back present, it’s like 11 at night and I’m in the bathroom. I don’t have any clothes on. I have no idea why. And I’m there with like five, six police officers.”
It was only later, Andrew said, that he saw the photo of himself incapacitated. He insists he did not knowingly consume drugs that night. “What I’m reading in this report is some tryst, some three people, this, that, and the third, and all of these are things that I have no recollection of. I never even met this third person,” Andrew said. “So at this point I’m like, ‘This is set up.’ ”
Still, he said, he should have never been in that hotel room. “Me being and putting myself in this situation to even communicate with another adult at that level was a mistake on my part,” Andrew told me. “I’m an adult, and I know that you don’t put yourself in certain situations. And I still made choices to put myself in that.”
Andrew elaborated, his wife looking on: “The non fidelis [unfaithful] part was I put myself in a situation where anything could have happened, including something that could have betrayed or would have betrayed my vows. And that’s the part that I wanted to own outright. Because I knew that much. Given the state that I was in, I knew that much was possible.”
That’s the version the Gillums have shared publicly, insistent that no one is owed further explanation or details. And until now, Dyson—the other man in the room—has declined to provide any confirmation or denial.
But when I later reached Dyson by phone, he told a very different story and maintained there was no setup. Although the Miami New Timesreported that Dyson and Gillum had met the previous spring, Dyson told me the reporter had misunderstood him. In fact, Dyson said, the two first connected a week or two prior on the gay-dating app Grindr and in the days since had met up multiple times for paid sexual encounters. He said Andrew passed out after taking “G,” an ecstasy-type drug often used by gay men to enhance their sex drives, which when combined with alcohol can knock people out. He said that on that night and others, both he and Andrew used G and other drugs.
Dyson acknowledged taking photos and videos, and sending some of them to friends, but said he took them in order to be able to later show Andrew what had happened. He said he then took care of Andrew for several hours before accidentally overdosing himself. He said the third man in the police report, whom I could not reach for comment, was another client who had never met Andrew and called 911 after showing up for a separate appointment.
“Everything I did was trying to help Andrew,” insisted Dyson, who said the incident has also scrambled his life: He and his fiancé separated, he was forced to leave his graduate nursing program, and he now pays the bills by selling nudes and porn on OnlyFans.
How one of the photos Dyson took that night, showing a naked Andrew seemingly passed out in his own vomit, ended up on a conservative political blog is a saga of its own. Dyson maintains that he never gave it to the media. Enrique Tarrio, of Proud Boys infamy, told me he began texting contacts in Miami after seeing news reports about the incident and before long had been sent a screenshot of the photo. He then contacted Jacob Engels, a right-wing journalist in Florida, who published it on his blog. Tarrio—who recently denied a Reuters report that he was a federal and local police informant in Miami in the early 2010s—and Engels wouldn’t reveal their source but said that to their knowledge Dyson was not involved directly or indirectly in their acquiring it.
What precisely happened that night remains unclear. After learning that I had contacted Dyson for comment, the Gillums canceled our scheduled follow-up interviews and declined to respond on the record to Dyson’s version of events.
As we spoke in the living room, Andrew recounted the incident in slow, deliberate sentences and said he is still 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 images that I am not aware of, that I’m not conscious of, that I didn’t give consent to, that I did not participate in… To see what these things have been done around you without your knowledge or consent. And then at that point you start to wonder, ‘What all happened? How did I get to this?’ ” Andrew told me. “And you start to feel like one of those people who don’t have power, which is not a cool place. Because even in bad decision-making, I want to know that I have the power, the choice.”
Across town that night in Miami, R. Jai and their friends were growing increasingly worried. For most of the day, their minds had been elsewhere—with the number of COVID-19 cases rapidly rising throughout the U.S., the wedding venue had abruptly canceled, leaving them with a 48-hour scramble to find a new one. Andrew had been texting with her throughout the day, but when she got to the rental house that evening, she discovered that he had never shown up. “I am thinking that Andrew is somewhere drunk, and I am scared that he has either been arrested for a DUI or that he’s had a bad accident,” she told me. “I am kind of slowly losing my shit.”
After a round of frantic phone calls, she discovered that he’d never checked out of his hotel room or picked up the rental car. She assumed he’d taken a nap and passed out for the night, and her worry turned to anger. She sent a scathing text, took a Tylenol PM, and went to sleep. She awoke the next morning to find Andrew, who’d gotten to the Airbnb a few hours earlier, pacing the front yard on the phone. “He’s like, ‘I need to tell you something.’ ” R. Jai recalled. “I am so confused because it just sounds like something out of a Lifetime movie. Police, O.D.? It just doesn’t make any sense.” They talked on the ride to the airport to pick up the rental car Andrew had abandoned. As they pulled in, Owens’s tweet posted.
For the next hour or so, the Gillums sat in a parking lot calling their families. He wanted to get back to Tallahassee. She insisted they not abandon the wedding. “My life has come to a screeching halt, but one of our very best friends says they’re not going to get married unless I marry them,” Andrew recalled.
Within hours, as conservative commentators frolicked in his embarrassment, a number of Democrats, Black public officials, and former colleagues were encasing Andrew in private support. His former CNN colleague Van Jones reached out before they’d even left Miami and connected them with life coach Iyanla Vanzant. Tyler Perry volunteered as a prayer partner and set them up with legendary crisis fixer Judy Smith, the inspiration for Scandal’s Olivia Pope. “As you know, I’ve been there,” Andrew says Bill Clinton told him during a phone check-in. “I know what it means to feel at your lowest and make decisions at your lowest that you don’t recognize yourself in.” Andrew’s wife, however, was less soothing. “If you want a fighting chance at your family,” R. Jai insisted, “you’ve got to get help.”
As Andrew went off to rehab, R. Jai took a leave from work to sort out homeschooling and consider her options. After thinking through the events of the past year, she decided she was done. She began wondering how to make a divorce most amicable for the children and rented an Airbnb apartment, unsure who would be moving into it once he returned from treatment.
“Neither one of us ended up going, because as soon as he came back, I just realized… I don’t want to scare my kids,” she said. “Their dad has been gone for 40-something days, and I can’t just leave. And then it just became ‘We can be civil and be friends and figure this out.’ And then it became a ‘For now, I want to fight for my marriage and so does he, so let’s just do that.’ ”
The Gillums said they began having a series of difficult conversations—he answered any and all questions she had about Miami; she confided that she’d started moving money into a separate account to prepare for a divorce.
“He goes to therapy on his own, I go to therapy on my own, and we’ve had group therapy, couples counseling. And it is, I think for us, deep and intimate conversations that probably would have once been extremely painful and hard to do,” R. Jai said. “We bought these relationship cards where we just ask each other questions, and it’s been kind of cool to talk in a way that I think is just different.”
The Gillums are civilians now with civilian problems: which parent is picking up which kid from school, what to do about the stove that went out just days before Thanksgiving, whether the local CVS still had Black Santas for sale.
But in recent months, Andrew has begun to inch back into public life. He launched a podcast that features a regular segment by R. Jai and co-anchored election night coverage for BET Digital. For the first time in adulthood, he’s not holding or flirting with public office, or confined to a government salary. But he bristled when asked if he’s considering a return to electoral politics. “No, and that’s not to say not ever.… It doesn’t tug at me in that way.”
It’s an open question whether, after the four years of moral shamelessness that was the Trump administration, the electorate still cares about the infidelities of its politicians. There’s certainly no lack of public figures who’ve been in a room with drugs or frequented sex workers. But no matter how far we’ve come from the America of Andrew’s boyhood, it remains to be seen if we’re capable of extending as much collective forgiveness to a bisexual lawmaker as to a straight one. And whether, in order to earn such forgiveness, Andrew would need to resolve the factual disputes about what actually happened in that hotel room that night.
“Andrew and I would probably be the first test cases,” former congresswoman Katie Hill told me. One of America’s few out bisexual politicians, Hill resigned from office in October 2019 after photos of her naked and combing the hair of a female campaign staffer with whom she was romantically involved were leaked.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that in recent months, Hill and Gillum have struck up a friendship: two rising Democratic stars cut down by images depicting them in ill-advised and vulnerable moments. A younger, more sexually understanding generation of voters, Hill hopes, may eventually enable her or Andrew to again seek public office: “I like to think that it’s possible.”
Andrew isn’t talking about that yet, but he did perk up toward the end of our interview when I suggested perhaps R. Jai would consider entering politics.
“Oh, God no!” she blurted out. “Being married to Andrew and meeting some of the awesome elected officials that I’ve had to meet, I think I’ve seen the beautiful parts of people who are political public servants—the public policy side, the people who have the true heart for it—but I’ve also had the misfortune of seeing the ugly side of politics. I just don’t have the skin for it.”
“I think she’s not giving herself enough credit,” Andrew interjected. “It’s for special 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 version of this story originally appeared in the March 2021 issue with the title "How a Politician’s Marriage Survives a Night of Scandal."
Last edited:
Did not read but is his wife claiming she did not know he was gay, and does she expect us to believe it?
Not just the gay shit but who wants to vote for a dude that at 41yo gets fucked up with meth addicts?
Fuck this dude
Fuck this dude