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This is an opinion column.
US Senate candidate Mike Durant is the war hero, but it was his sister, Mary Ryan, who did the Durant thing has not found the courage to do.
She sat for an interview.
For more than an hour, Ryan, who lives in North Carolina, sat with Alabama Political Reporter columnist Josh Moon and spoke about the trauma she endured – almost daily sexual assaults by her father when she was a child.
As awful as that sounds, the assaults are only part of her decades-long ordeal. The other part, the unimaginable part, is what came later. When Ryan told the rest of her family about the abuse and confronted her father, her mother and brother rallied – to her father’s side.
Her experience has led Ryan to learn a lot about “incest families” as she calls them, and in the interview, she explains that this sort of reaction, as incomprehensible as it might seem, is not uncommon among families where abuse has happened.
“That’s not unusual at all,” she says. “Sometimes, denial and shame beat out love.”
Blaming and shunning the victims of sexual abuse happens a lot, she says.
And it happened to her.
At first, she says, her family did not believe her. However, Durant confronted their father, who confessed, and Durant documented this in letters he sent to Ryan.
He knew it, she says. He just couldn’t believe it.
This reckoning happened over about four years in the early 1990s, which was also when Durant was captured in Somalia after his helicopter crashed there, an event portrayed in the movie Blackhawk Down. The collision of these events brought national attention to the family tragedy and put Durant on the spot – would he choose to support his father, the abuser, or his sister, the victim?
He chose his father.
In an interview with the TV show “American Journal,” Durant said his father had admitted some things but was not the monster his sister made him out to be.
“He was a good father,” Durant said on the show, according to an AP account from the time. “I mean, he spanked us when we were little but he certainly didn’t abuse us.”
It was a denial seemingly contradicted in the letters he had written to his sister.
Today, Ryan speaks of these things calmly in matter-of-fact terms. She has spent years in therapy and has processed what happened to her. She has forgiven her family for shunning her, and when her father was dying, Ryan, who’s a nurse, helped care for him in his last days.
In the end, her father showed remorse, she says. Her brother never did, she says
And he still doesn’t.
Today, Durant appears irate that anyone is bringing this up. He doesn’t seem to understand why voters might consider this a measurement of his character or his courage, or lack thereof.
And he still hasn’t let go of his denial. Instead, Durant blames his sister for how she responded to being raped almost daily by their father.
“It’s not me that’s estranged,” Durant told conservative radio talk show host Dale Jackson in January. “It’s the whole family because of the things that she did. Again, is it really relevant? ”
And he blames his opponents and the “fake news” for bringing all this to light again.
Perhaps, for Alabama voters, what is most stunning is how unprepared Durant has been for all of this, things that were easily predictable. A decent political consultant could have crafted a response in anticipation…
Scratch that. A decent person could have known what to say.
Since Durant and his campaign seem incapable, let me do that part for them. He could have said something like this…
Yeah, I was inconsistent with what I said back then because, quite frankly, I didn’t want to believe any of it was true. It was an unimaginable family tragedy. I was embarrassed when it became a public spectacle, and I didn’t direct my anger at the right person. I’m sorry for not being more supportive of my sister. Obviously, I didn’t go through what she did, but it tore me to shreds, too. I hope one day we can reconcile but I’ll understand if that’s not possible. But I want her to know I’m sorry and I love her.
That’s what he could have said. Instead, he blamed her again during that radio interview this year.
And he’s still blaming the wrong people.
When I reached out two weeks ago to ask Durant to sit for an interview, his campaign asked that I put the questions in writing, instead. I sent an email, and then, nothing but silence until after I wrote a column about all of this. Once it was published, the campaign spokesperson, Scott Stone, gave me a statement. It was more of the same.
“This blatant character assassination on the part of career politicians is reprehensible. Kyle Whitmire is too busy carrying Katie Boyd Britt’s water to consider the fact that Mike Durant confronted his father, supported his sister and no amount of gonzo journalism will change that. It comes as no surprise that the media is going after conservative outsider Mike Durant, after members of the liberal media like Kyle spent the last 6 years attacking President Donald Trump while he was fighting to shake up the business per usual and take on the establishment in Washington. ”
I could take that apart, line by line, but I’ll focus on three words, instead. Go watch his sister’s interview and tell me if Durant “supported his sister.”
He blames everyone but his father, she says.
He blames everyone but himself, she says.
“He’s either in very deep denial, or ignorance, or he doesn’t care,” Ryan says in the interview. “I don’t know which one it is.”
Durant needs to answer real questions about what happened in his family. He needs to speak about these things calmly and cogently.
He has an example to follow. All he has to do is listen to his sister.
Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group, 2020 winner of the Walker Stone Award, winner of the 2021 SPJ award for opinion writing, and 2021 winner of the Molly Ivins prize for political commentary. You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb. And he Twitter. And he Instagram.
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