Here are some true facts about former Virginia State Delegate Joe Morrissey.
Pro tip to politicians: If you impregnate a teenager, don’t send out this photo
Dylan Matthews was a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.
- This is a real picture of him:
I was just handed this photo of Joe Morrissey -- by Joe Morrissey. #BreakTheInternet pic.twitter.com/5H89jyX5ZT
— Joe St. George (@JoeStGeorge) May 14, 2015 - The other person in the picture is Myrna Pride, his 19-year-old former receptionist.
- She is holding their 9-week-old son, Chase, whose paternity Morrissey acknowledged Wednesday.
- Joe Morrissey is 57 years old.
- They are wearing antebellum "period dress." Like slaveowners used to wear.
- Morrissey spent 90 days in jail after pleading guilty to "contributing to the delinquency of a minor," the minor in question being Pride.
- That was the result of a plea deal. Prosecutors initially charged him with felony counts of supervisory indecent liberties with a minor (for sleeping with Pride when she was 17), possession of child pornography (for soliciting and receiving a nude photo of her at 17), and distribution of child pornography (for sending that photo to a friend).
- Pride has given media outlets permission to identify her.
- Here's another photo of Morrissey, Pride, and their son, Chase, together in very normal costumes:
- Despite taking the plea, Morrissey and Pride insist they did not have sex until she was 18, the same age at which he impregnated her.
- Morrissey and Pride additionally claimed that Pride’s “jealous ex-girlfriend hacked into their phones and sent a series of salacious text messages” in an attempt to set Morrissey up.
- After pleading guilty to the “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” charge, Morrissey resigned his House of Delegates seat.
- But he immediately ran for the seat again in a special election to replace himself, and won.
- Morrissey had served as a Democrat, but after the party adopted a candidate selection process for the special election intended to block him from the nomination, he won the seat back as an independent.
- He then resigned his seat again after deciding to move out of his district to run for state Senate in a primary against an incumbent Democrat.
- He’d initially intended to keep his seat, but it turns out serving after moving out of your district is totally unconstitutional in Virginia.
- The Pride imbroglio is hardly Morrissey’s first brush with the law. He has been cited with contempt of court numerous times, most notably, as commonwealth’s attorney (a.k.a. district attorney) for Richmond, for getting into a fistfight with a defense attorney outside of a jury trial. He served five days in jail for that.
- He was indicted and acquitted of five bribery, perjury, and misuse of public funds charges as commonwealth’s attorney, and was suspended and reinstated to the post a number of times.
- Other notable incidents, summarized by the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Meredith Newman: a 90-day jail sentence in 1998 for breaking court rules by talking to reporters on a drug case, an assault and battery conviction in 1999, and a 90-day jail term in 2000 for a probation violation on the 1998 conviction after Morrissey “lied when he denied attempting to bribe a Habitat for Humanity construction supervisor to falsely state that Morrissey had completed his community service.”
- After that probation violation, he was disbarred in Virginia and banned from practicing in federal court.
- He then moved to Ireland to teach law, leaving after local media caught wind of his disbarment and jail stints. Then he went to Australia to teach law, but returned to the US in 2006 after his record in the US came to light and he was denied a law license.
- Not missing a beat, he won a House of Delegates seat the next year.
- Perhaps his most notable moment in the Delegates was the time he brandished an unloaded AK-47 on the House floor to make a point about gun control:
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