Rachel Maddow Bashes ‘Slut-Shaming’ in Bridgegate Report

Yesterday marked the release of the big investigation into the New Jersey BridgeGate scandal, and there have been quite a lot of criticisms that the investigation was tilted in Chris Christie‘s favor. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki said the report “reads like Christie’s defense,” and his colleague Rachel Maddow noticed something particularly disturbing about the report last night.

In the report, there are repeated references to a relationship Christie aide Bridget Kelly and Bill Stepien, and Maddow wondered exactly what the relevance of the relationship was, because it’s “never explained, it’s just supposed to be self-evident.”

And Kelly never even spoke to the investigators, so the repeated references weren’t even added because anyone they spoke to brought them up. Maddow noted:

What they’ve printed throughout the report is gossip about what they heard about their relationship and how it was going. They just gratuitously bring that up as they blame the whole thing on her. In real life, this is called slut-shaming.

And Maddow was very disturbed by how a taxpayer-funded report ended up engaging in that kind of slut-shaming.

[photo via screengrab]

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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

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