Anti-gay Republican’s aide ‘sexually enslaved and abused his fiancée’
A Republican adviser has been accused of sexually enslaving and attacking his fiancée.
Benjamin Sparks, who worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, allegedly forced her to sign a five-page contract saying that she would become his “slave and property.”
The 46-year-old woman, who has chosen to remain anonymous, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that she was made to have sex with him whenever he wanted.
Mitt Romney, who Sparks worked for (Getty)
The contract also stated that she had to be naked at all times, kneel and direct her gaze downwards whenever she entered his presence, and wear a collar.
Sparks’ ex-fiancée also accused him of sexual assault.
“He was very demanding and did not take no for an answer,” she said.
“Over the last month it escalated into very rough sex where he’d actually hurt me. He back-handed me… and forced himself on me.”
A Las Vegas police report details how Sparks evaded arrest after a domestic dispute at his ex-fiancée’s house last week.
Officers decided that there was “probable cause to arrest Sparks for domestic battery,” and charges are currently pending.
According to the police report and other documents, the couple moved in together the day after they started dating in November.
Last week, the day before the police were called to her house, Sparks texted the woman to ask that she be bound, blindfolded and have sex with other men in front of him.
This was her breaking point, she said.
Last Thursday, the woman tried to leave their home because she suspected Sparks was under the influence of drugs, but he wouldn’t let her out for two hours, according to the police report.
Sparks also called 911 and claimed that the woman had tried to kill herself – which she has denied – and that she had physically attacked him.
When the police arrived, Sparks was nowhere to be seen.
She said she had come forward to break the cycle of abuse.
“I truly don’t want this to happen to another girl,” she said.
I’m strong and have a great support system and despite that, this almost broke me.”
Following the start of a police investigation, Sparks was fired from his position as political affairs director of RedRock Strategies, a political consulting company with offices in Las Vegas and Washington, DC.
As well as Romney, Sparks also worked for Nevada Republican Cresent Hardy, who served in the House of Representatives from 2015 to 2017, in a bid to get him re-elected.
Cresent Hardy (Getty)
According to a Human Rights Campaign report from 2015, Hardy was “one of the worst new members of Congress,” who, the organisation said, “has gone out of his way to stop equality for LGBT people across the country.”
“Extremists like Hardy are more determined than ever to wipe out all the progress we’ve made for the LGBT community,” the report said.
Hardy has said that he “will always vote against same-sex marriage because of my religious beliefs, the way I was raised”.
“For me to vote for it would be to deny the same God that I believe in.”
He has also publicly said that protecting gay people from discrimination in the workplace is “segregation,” and was one of the few assembly members to vote against a Nevada bill banning housing and job discrimination against transgender people.
Cresent Hardy meeting Paul Ryan (Getty)
Hardy has also expressed a wish to reinstate ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ in the US military, according to the HRC.
Last month, an anti-gay Republican’s aide was fired after police found him in the middle of a sexual encounter with a 17-year-old boy.
Nick Provenzano, 56, served as deputy district director to Randy Hultgren, a Republican congressman for Illinois who has spoken against same-sex marriage.
But the aide was fired this week after Hultgren’s office discovered that a police officer had found him shirtless with a teenage boy he met on Grindr, in an SUV with its lights off, parked on a dead-end road.
Anti-gay ‘family values’ Republican Bill Dix also resigned earlier this year after he was caught cheating on his wife.
(Facebook/William Cletus Dix)
And Dix was far from the first ‘family values’ Republican to get in trouble for their behaviour.
Last year, Ohio congressman Wes Goodman – a married Republican lawmaker with a long history of campaigning against LGBT rights – resigned after being caught having gay sex in his office.
(Wes Goodman)
The politician wrote on his now-defunct website about “healthy, vibrant, thriving, values-driven families” being “the key to Ohio’s future greatness.
Republican Ralph Shortey, a senior member of Donald Trump’s primary campaign team in Oklahoma, stepped down as state senator last March after being discovered in a hotel room with a 17-year-old boy who Shortey hired as a prostitute.
Ralph Shortey
Later in the year, he pleaded guilty to a child sex trafficking offence for soliciting sex from the boy.
In exchange for this plea, federal prosecutors dropped three counts of child pornography against the former politician.
Erika Harold
And in March, it was revealed that Erika Harold, a Republican candidate for Illinois Attorney General, allegedly said she would rather hand over a child to known child abusers than a loving gay couple.
