Robinson also wrote repeatedly of a 2014 domestic violence encounter involving then-NFL star Ray Rice, who was seen on a surveillance video dragging his apparently unconscious fiancée out of an elevator. In a post directed at Rice’s “lady friend,” Robinson suggested the woman was at fault for the physical altercation.
“I’m a 350lb man but aint no way in HELL I’m gonna’ slap no pro football player,” Robinson wrote on Facebook. “I’m to old for an a$$whoopin’.”
Robinson has drawn scrutiny for his incendiary remarks on other issues, including about LGBTQ+ people, religion and other political figures. But his comments on domestic violence and sexual assault stand out for their tone and frequency, as well as Robinson’s repeated questioning of accusers.
While Robinson is, in some ways, emblematic of the Republican Party’s turn under Donald Trump toward rewarding inflammatory, sexist language, his dismissals of women threaten to test Robinson’s appeal with voters troubled by that history, in particular female voters.
Robinson’s caustic remarks could also make Republican hopes of flipping a Democratic governorship more challenging, according to political strategists, including some Republicans.
Robinson’s Democratic opponent, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein — as well as President Biden — are hoping to win the votes of women in North Carolina by significant margins in November.
Veteran GOP political consultant Paul Shumaker argues that Robinson’s comments could make it difficult for the party to attract the support of female and unaffiliated voters in North Carolina needed to win the governor’s race.
“For a Republican to win statewide, they have to break even with White, female voters. That’s a function of mathematics. … With suburban women, same thing,” said Shumaker, who worked for one of Robinson’s gubernatorial primary competitors, Bill Graham.
In the 2020 presidential election, women made up 56 percent of voters in North Carolina and favored Biden by 7 percentage points, according to exit polls.
Asked about Robinson’s comments on domestic violence and sexual assault, Robinson’s campaign accused The Washington Post of being part of a “Democrat smear machine.”
“No matter how many partisan hit pieces The Washington Post cranks out, if and when he should become governor, Mark Robinson will take the oath and duties of his office with the utmost respect, working to make North Carolina better for people of all backgrounds and walks of life; by growing our economy, reforming our schools and creating a culture of life that does more to support mothers and families,” Robinson campaign spokesperson Mike Lonergan said in a statement.
In his 2020 campaign for his current position and this year’s race for governor, Robinson has refused to apologize when asked about controversial public comments. Last year, he downplayed past comments about Jews as having been “poorly worded.” Among other things, Robinson has minimized Nazi atrocities in Facebook posts.
Trump and other Republicans have embraced his rhetorical style. Trump endorsed Robinson during his primary for governor, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Trump, who has been working to chip away at Biden’s advantage with Black voters, included Robinson in a Black Americans for Trump coalition that Trump announced Saturday.
Robinson’s provocative rhetoric is central to his political rise.
He reached conservative prominence in 2018 when he delivered an impassioned speech at a Greensboro City Council meeting as it took comments on gun violence following a school shooting in Parkland, Fla., and considered canceling a local gun show. Video of his speech, which focused on the threat of firearms restrictions, went viral, and Robinson quit his job in furniture manufacturing, focusing full-time on public speaking and politics.
Robinson jumped into the lieutenant governor’s race in 2019 and won in a crowded GOP primary. He narrowly defeated the Democratic nominee in the general election.
Robinson has been open about growing up in a violent household. His official biography page says his father “was an alcoholic who routinely abused his mother.”
During the mid-2010s, Robinson made comments on his Facebook page that downplayed or otherwise made light of domestic violence against women. He often expressed the belief that women did not want to face the same consequences for committing domestic violence that men do.
Data shows that domestic violence affects women more than men. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 41 percent of women and 26 percent of men have reported being impacted by intimate partner violence in their lifetimes, which includes “contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner.”
In August 2014, Robinson wrote that women want to be seen as equal to men except “when you haul off in anger and slap the crap out of someone who you KNOW can kick your A$$!!!”
Robinson also repeatedly invoked the 2014 domestic violence incident involving Rice, the former Baltimore Ravens running back who was arrested after a fight with his fiancée at a casino in Atlantic City.
Robinson’s post declaring he would not slap Rice came in the days after the NFL suspended Rice, who was charged with aggravated assault in March 2014, for the first two games of the following season. About a month after Robinson’s post, TMZ published more video that showed Rice punching his fiancée and knocking her out. Rice ultimately pleaded not guilty and participated in a one-year pretrial program that led to the dismissal of the case.
Robinson liked a comment in response to his post declaring that he would not hit Rice. The comment expressed agreement and said, “my mom taught us,dumb enough to hit a man,dumb enough to get hit back.”
Robinson posted at least three more times about Rice that year, accusing the media of paying too much attention to the situation.
At least one of Robinson’s comments on domestic violence came up during the Republican primary for governor. In February, one of Robinson’s primary opponents, Dale Folwell, posted on X a screenshot of a 2017 Facebook post from Robinson that asked, “So if someone beats the bird dog hell of their spouse at the mall…. is it still ‘Domestic Violence?’”
“Were you asking out of personal concern?” Folwell wrote. “Have you ever hit a woman @markrobinsonNC? Yes or no?”
Folwell, the North Carolina state treasurer, finished a distant second to Robinson in the March primary, getting 19 percent of the vote. A third candidate, Graham, received 16 percent. Robinson won nearly 65 percent of the vote.
Reached for this story, Folwell declined to comment other than to say he has not heard an answer to the question he posed.
Along with online commentary making light of domestic violence, over the past decade Robinson has joked about and cast doubt on several women who accused prominent men of sexual misconduct. He had some repeated targets, including the women who accused Cosby, Weinstein and Kavanaugh of sexual assault.
Kavanaugh and Weinstein have denied any wrongdoing. This year, Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction was overturned by the New York Court of Appeals. He also faces a 16-year sentence on a separate case in California, where he was convicted in 2022 of rape, forced oral copulation and sexual misconduct.
Cosby acknowledged in a 2005 court deposition that he intended to give drugs to young women whom he wanted to have sex. In 2021, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated his sexual assault conviction.
In 2018 and 2019, Robinson posted memes appearing to mock the allegations by California professor Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault and testified before Congress.
One of his posts appeared to suggest that Blasey Ford’s allegations were fake, along with “those women who accused Roy Moore.” Moore, a Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Alabama, was accused of sexual assault or questionable behavior by at least eight women — including one who alleged that Moore initiated a sexual encounter when she was 14 and he was 32. Moore has long denied the allegations.
Robinson similarly shared memes mocking actress Ashley Judd, who accused Weinstein of sexual assault. And he repeatedly suggested that the sexual harassment claims brought against male public figures was the result of a broader conspiracy, claiming, among other outlandish theories, that the Illuminati were involved in publicizing accusations against Cosby.
In a November 2017 Facebook post, Robinson asserted that “Weinstein and the rest of these high profile Hollywood elites were merely sacrificial lambs” who were “slaughtered” as part of a broader effort “to smear the airwaves with talk of ‘sexual harassment’ and how pervasive the culture of ‘toxic masculinity’ is in America.”
“When Democrats lose,” he argued in another post a month later, “… they make a new way to cry wolf by shouting SEXUAL HARASSMENT. And they will kill as many of their own with that new way as they need to, as long as they get their targets on the other side.”
And during a 2018 radio interview, Robinson said that terminations for sexual harassment in workplaces was a “concerted effort by the left … where fear rules.”
Robinson has also targeted women in other ways.
He has mocked the appearance of Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. And he declared in a 2016 Facebook post that “Feminism was planted in the ‘Garden,’ watered by the devil, and is harvested and sold by his minions.” In 2022, he suggested at a church that men, not women, are meant to be leaders. Acknowledging that he was “getting ready to get in trouble,” Robinson exclaimed to the congregation: “Called to be led by men!”
When “it was time to face down Goliath,” he added, God “sent David, not Davita.”
He later suggested that it was “ridiculous” to conclude he did not view women as leaders and that he was only “encouraging men to stand up and take on the role of leadership as well.”
The North Carolina gubernatorial race is a top priority for both parties this fall. Democratic incumbent Roy Cooper is leaving office due to term limits, and it is the only Democratic-held governorship on the ballot in a state that Trump narrowly carried in 2020.
An April poll from Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy found Stein and Robinson were in a tight race, with Stein receiving support from 47 percent of registered voters in the state and Robinson getting 45 percent. The result was within the poll’s margin of error. Stein led Robinson among female voters, 52 percent to 40 percent.
The survey also found Trump had 49 percent in the presidential race and Biden 43 percent. Female voters were more divided than in the governor’s race, with 47 percent backing Biden and 44 percent supporting Trump, which was within the poll’s margin of error.
The state is crucial for Biden, whose campaign is targeting it as a pickup opportunity after narrowly losing it in 2020. Biden’s advisers believe Robinson will be a key motivator for Democrats to turn out in North Carolina, along with the state’s ban last year on abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy in most cases.
Robinson’s history of incendiary commentary could factor prominently into the general election. One of Stein’s first TV ads is entirely made up of audio clips of Robinson railing against abortion over the years.
“If you have a candidate who says these kinds of divisive and demeaning statements again and again and again, it’s not something that was made as a joke one time,” said Morgan Jackson, a Democratic political consultant in North Carolina who advises Stein’s gubernatorial campaign.
The Republican Governors Association has put its weight behind Robinson’s candidacy.
“Flipping North Carolina red is a top priority this fall, and we are looking forward to supporting Mark Robinson and working to ensure he becomes the next Governor of North Carolina,” Courtney Alexander, RGA national press secretary, emphasized in a statement. She declined to address Robinson’s history of controversial comments.
Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy said the Robinson-Stein matchup is “close enough for Stein to keep his foot on the pedal” — and suggested Robinson’s controversial comments may not hurt him as much as some think. Quinnipiac also polled the race in April and found Stein led Robinson by single digits.
“We live in an age of political bombast,” Malloy wrote in an email. “What was once wholly unacceptable to say on the campaign trail, in a bar or at the dining room table is accepted as undisputed fact and not necessarily considered offensive. Robinson has a lot of support. Clearly some North Carolinians have found a voice in his voice.”
Hannah Knowles contributed to this report.
