Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola’s campaign is defending her following a New York Times report detailing allegations from former staffers that she berated aides, used slurs, and shoved an employee.
Peltola’s campaign attributed some of the reported behavior to the grief she experienced after losing both her mother and husband in 2023 in a statement to Fox News.
“Mary suddenly and tragically lost both her mother and her husband in the span of a few months in 2023,” campaign spokesman Harry Child said. “At the time of their passing, Mary was parenting kids through their own grief, serving full-time in the U.S. House of Representatives thousands of miles from home, and running a competitive re-election campaign – all while shouldering the enormous burden of grief.”
While Child acknowledged that Peltola struggled with her grief, he said she treated her staff with “respect and care, and she maintains close positive relationships with her staff spanning her nearly 30 years in public service.”
“Exaggerating and outright lying about moments from the hardest period of her life, and falsely presenting them as a pattern of behavior, is wrong,” he added.
Peltola’s husband was killed in a plane crash in 2023 after a hunting trip.
The Washington Examiner reached out to Peltola’s campaign for additional comment.
The report, published Wednesday, cited former aides, witnesses to the alleged incidents, and contemporaneous text messages to describe what it characterized as a volatile workplace during Peltola’s time in Congress.
The report alleged that Peltola shoved a male staffer in the chest with one hand, causing him to stumble backward, according to a person who witnessed the incident and two others who heard about it at the time. The aide left Peltola’s team soon afterward, according to the New York Times.
The outlet also reported that Peltola berated another staffer while mimicking a reporter and pushing a water bottle toward the woman’s face. Text messages sent at the time allegedly described Peltola as being “an inch” from the staffer and “shoving” the bottle in her face.
The report also pointed to several offensive text messages attributed to Peltola. In one message from January 2024, she reportedly expressed anger toward Planned Parenthood.
“I hope Planned Parenthood knows that if we don’t win it’s more their loss than ours. F*** THOSE B****ES,” she wrote in a 2024 text message viewed by the outlet.
Later that year, Peltola reportedly wrote that she hoped a woman associated with the local Planned Parenthood chapter would “die of a botched abortion.”
The allegations also detail an incident where Peltola used the slurs “r***rd” and “f****t” in conversations and text messages with staff. Her campaign denied that she used the latter slur, but said she regretted using the word “r***rd.”
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The report comes as Peltola is mounting a bid to return to Congress after serving as Alaska’s at-large representative from 2022 to 2025.
Peltola first won the House seat in a 2022 special election following the death of longtime Republican Rep. Don Young. She subsequently won a full term, becoming the first Alaska native to serve in Congress. Peltola’s campaign is now focused on another statewide race, as she challenges incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) in November.
Peltola and Sullivan both advanced from Alaska’s August top-four primary, with Peltola receiving 49.54% of the vote and Sullivan receiving 41.40%, giving Democrats hope that they could flip the seat for control of the upper chamber. Alaska’s system advances the four highest vote-getters to the general election, where voters rank candidates in order of preference.