Has Nancy Mace’s Crusade Against Sexual Violence Ruined Her Career? (original) (raw)

Last year, the Republican congresswoman accused her ex-fiancé of sexual assault. It may have doomed her bid for South Carolina’s gubernatorial nomination.

Photograph by Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc / Getty

Last fall, Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, was flying out of Charleston when a security detail that was supposed to escort her to her gate was slow to arrive. According to onlookers, Mace exploded. “Fucking incompetent,” she reportedly said, while asserting that she was “a fucking representative” and questioning why she wasn’t being “treated like a senator.”

It was one of a growing number of incidents in which the congresswoman is said to have engaged in unprofessional, strange, or even somewhat sad behavior. In February, New York magazine reported that Mace had been having staffers create burner accounts to defend her on social media, and to allegedly boost her standing on Reddit forums about the “hottest women in Congress.” An employee manual from Mace’s office that was leaked to the press outlined demands for television bookings—at least one per day for national outlets, and six per week for stations airing in her district—that spoke to a voracious appetite for attention. The report by New York magazine said that former staffers have whispered about Mace’s drinking and marijuana use. Cameron Morabito, Mace’s director of operations, denied these allegations, saying, “I hope she sues for every time you got paid to write this defamatory bullshit.”

Mace’s alleged behavior would be a concerning pattern for anyone. But it is perhaps even more unusual given that, in August, Mace launched a long-shot bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in South Carolina. She now trails Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette and Attorney General Alan Wilson in polls, and is expected to lose in the state’s June 9th primary—a defeat that could well end her political career.

When she was first elected to the House of Representatives, in November, 2020, Mace was one of the G.O.P.’s rising stars. “A compelling new voice urging her party to change its ways” is how the Times described her. In 2022, she did what many Republicans have found impossible: won her reëlection primary even though President Donald Trump had endorsed somebody else. In recent years, she has rebranded, casting herself as a loyal Trump acolyte, eager to wage culture war on behalf of a party that is not ready to move on from him.

New York reported that some of her former aides—who have left Mace’s office and campaign at a staggering rate—trace her downward spiral to February of 2025. That’s when Mace gave an incendiary presentation on the House floor. Standing beside a poster board featuring photos of her ex-fiancé, a Charleston-based businessman named Patrick Bryant, and of three other men, beneath the word “PREDATORS,” she described Bryant and his associates as “a cabal of rapists, this cabal of sex traffickers, this cabal of Peeping Toms.”

According to Mace, in late October, 2023, she found photos and videos of unconscious or “incapacitated” women—and at least one person who looked to her to be an underage girl—being sexually assaulted by Bryant and several of his friends. Mace says that, on Bryant’s devices, she also found photos and videos taken of women and girls without their knowledge, including when they were nude or in sexually compromising positions.

During her speech, Mace said that as she sorted through the material she came across a video of a nude woman who clearly did not know that she was being filmed. “She was slender,” Mace said. “She had long, brown hair.” It gradually dawned on Mace that the woman was her. Later, in a different speech in the House chamber, Mace displayed a nude photo of herself, one that she says Bryant took without her consent, using a hidden camera. She also claimed that later, when their relationship was subsequently ending, she was physically assaulted by Bryant, an incident that she says left a scar.

Bryant and his associates have denied all wrongdoing, and Bryant is suing Mace for defamation. South Carolina Law Enforcement Division confirmed that an investigation into Bryant’s conduct was opened in late 2023; Mace’s office says that at least two other women have since come forward to accuse Bryant of misconduct. If more information about these alleged incidents comes to light, it’s not likely that we will hear about it: Bryant and Mace are now both under a judge’s gag order as their various legal cases against each other play out in South Carolina courts. (The accusations Mace levied during her February presentation were protected under the House and Debate clause of the Constitution.)

But Mace’s remarks on the House floor are now echoing across South Carolina. In her 2025 floor speech, Mace addressed the state attorney general, now one of her opponents in the gubernatorial primary, saying that law enforcement mishandled the case when she came forward. “Women who come forward are treated like criminals under your leadership, in your system, and on your watch,” she said. “Attorney General Alan Wilson, you know there were deliberate delays,” Mace added. “Two hundred and twenty-eight days of delay. . . . That’s seven months, two weeks, and four days of delay.” Wilson called the accusation “categorically false.” “South Carolina’s got a choice,” Mace wrote on X when Wilson announced his candidacy last June. “We can keep electing politicians who protect child r*pists and cover up m*rder cases . . . or we can elect someone who kicks in doors and cleans up the mess.”

During her years in Congress, Mace has made strong impressions—often strongly negative ones—across a wide array of constituencies. Though she began her career in Congress by opposing the January 6th riot, Mace quickly changed course, becoming an enthusiastic adherent of the MAGA movement. She has long perturbed liberals and Democrats with her ardent support for Donald Trump and her provocative, frequently vulgar rhetoric. To many feminists, she has forfeited any chance at credibility with a virulent anti-trans campaign, which she has waged since 2024, often targeting Sarah McBride, of Delaware, Congress’s sole trans representative. The G.O.P. has soured on Mace, too, angered by her agitation around the Epstein investigation and willingness to make a public fuss over alleged misconduct by Republican members of Congress.

It may be because Mace has alienated so many potential allies and made enemies out of so many onetime friends that the gravity of what she says happened to her does not seem to have penetrated the public consciousness. She says that she, and other women, were systematically sexually assaulted by a group of men who deliberately made them too intoxicated to consent, and then documented their attacks in photos and videos for their own amusement. She says that this went on for years. She says that this happened to her while she was a member of Congress.

Since her speech, Mace has taken up a crusade against sexual abuse, particularly in Congress. Together with other far-right Republican women—notably Lauren Boebert, of Colorado, and Anna Paulina Luna, of Florida—she has endeavored to publicly challenge what she says is a culture of rampant sexual misconduct in Washington. She took on a prominent role in response to the Epstein controversy, publicly breaking with President Trump in calling for the release of Justice Department materials related to the convicted sex offender; her unwillingness to change her vote, despite pressure from the White House, was part of what led Trump to reverse course and endorse the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November, 2025. Earlier this year, she again proved willing to antagonize the Administration when she joined Democrats in forcing an investigation into the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein affair, voting to subpoena then Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Most problematically for the House Republican leadership, Mace has been relentless in criticizing her male colleagues in Congress who have been accused of sexual abuse—including her fellow-Republicans. For months, she was a loud and persistent antagonist to Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican who admitted to an extramarital affair with a staffer who later died, reportedly by self-immolation. Mace called on Gonzales to resign months before he finally did, in April, after Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, was also ousted amid his own sexual-misconduct allegations, which he denies. (Their near-simultaneous resignations meant that the Republicans’ narrow House majority went unchanged.)

Later that month, Mace introduced a resolution to expel Cory Mills, a Republican from Florida, after petitioning to remove his committee assignments last year. Mills, who is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, was arrested in connection with a domestic-violence incident in February, 2025, and was reported to the police for threatening another woman with revenge porn later that year. (He denies both accusations.) Most recently, Mace has taken the helm of an effort to make public the payouts dispensed by members of Congress and their staff over sexual-harassment claims. In press interviews this May, Mace revealed that taxpayers have footed the bill for congressional sexual-harassment settlements to the tune of three hundred thousand dollars between 2007 and 2017.

Mace has long been among the conservative Republican women most willing to adopt the rhetoric of female empowerment. Maybe this is because she began her career in the early aughts, an era when feminism had gone mainstream—and when the politics of male grievance that animated so much of Donald Trump’s 2024 coalition was still comparatively fringe. The daughter of a retired Army general, she became, in 1999, the first female cadet to graduate from the Citadel, South Carolina’s military college. Her 2001 memoir about her time there, “In the Company of Men,” describes how she earned begrudging respect from her fellow-cadets and discomfited her commanding officers when they found bras and a pink alarm clock in her dorm during mandatory bunk inspections.

During her time in the South Carolina state legislature, Mace successfully campaigned to add rape and incest exceptions to the state’s 2019 six-week abortion ban; ahead of the vote on the bill, she spoke publicly for the first time about being raped by a classmate when she was sixteen. It was the aftermath of that teen-age sexual assault that caused her to pursue a degree from the Citadel. Succeeding in that maximally masculine institution became, she told the Charleston Post and Courier in 2019, “something she had to prove to herself she could do.” “It’s something you can’t believe happened, and you ask yourself, ‘How did I let this happen to me?’ It’s very difficult to overcome,” she said.

But Mace’s feminism has always been selective. She is an opponent of most abortion rights and has endorsed the doctrine of fetal personhood. And she has been tactically evasive when pressed about the many, many allegations of sexual abuse committed by the President, including those of E. Jean Carroll, which were affirmed by a jury. “Quite frankly, E. Jean Carroll’s comments when she did get the judgment, joking about what she was going to buy, it doesn’t—it makes it harder for women to come forward when they make a mockery out of rape, when they joke about it. It’s not O.K.,” Mace said in a contentious interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, in March, 2024.

Her stance on gay and trans rights has evolved in especially unsettling ways. When Mace arrived in Washington, she distinguished herself with her backing of gay and trans rights, which were quickly becoming a culture-war flash point. “I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality,” she told the Washington Examiner in 2021. “No one should be discriminated against.” In 2022, after voting for a bill to insure permanent federal recognition for same-sex marriages, Mace, who was divorced twice before she met Bryant, tweeted, “If gay couples want to be as happily or miserably married as straight couples, more power to them. Trust me, I’ve tried it more than once.”

But this position was short-lived. After McBride’s election, Mace introduced a resolution that would have banned transgender women from using restrooms in the Capitol; when a foster youth activist named James McIntyre shook her hand and spoke on behalf of the rights of trans minors at a photo op a few weeks later, she accused him of “physically accosting” her, and he spent the night in jail. (Charges against McIntyre were quickly dropped.) Amid the firestorm, Mace embarked on a media tour to publicize her opposition to trans rights, and took the opportunity to make frequent use of the word “tranny,” a move that seemed calculated to shock. “Tranny. Yeah, tranny, tranny, tranny,” Mace said to a twenty-year-old trans University of South Carolina student who asked her to stop using the slur in April, 2025.

Many Republicans have adopted transphobia as a culture-war issue. Mace is unusual in that her insistence that she does so for the sake of women rights seems more plausibly sincere. “I, as a woman, am standing up to protect other women from men being in our private spaces,” she said on Fox News of the bathroom-ban resolution. Now gay people, too, whose rights she once voted to protect, have become targets of her hate. “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” she wrote on X, last October. After Trump endorsed Evette in the South Carolina gubernatorial campaign on May 29th, Mace posted a photograph of her opponent superimposed over pride flags.

One way to read Mace’s congressional trajectory is that she made a bet in 2021 that the Republican Party was ready to break with Donald Trump. When it became clear that it wasn’t, she pivoted. The Party became pro-Trump again, and so she became pro-Trump again. The Party became anti-trans, so she became anti-trans.

It is possible that Mace’s recent feminist positions, too, are the result of a political calculation, an attempt to strategically weaponize pro-woman rhetoric for her own ends. Yet it is difficult, when one takes stock of her behavior over the past few years, to see a woman coolly appraising her own interests. It does not excuse Mace’s conduct to say that her behavior in recent months seems less like that of someone strategically pursuing her own ambitions than like someone unravelling under the weight of what appears to be great pain.

Mace’s brand of female empowerment has always been about demonstrating her personal equality with men—her ability to meet their standards at the Citadel, to beat them in Republican primaries, to march beside them in the halls of Congress. Even her transphobia can feel, at times, like an imitation of male behavior: in trans women, she found a kind of woman toward whom she could direct the contemptuous misogyny of a right-wing man. In her speech on the House floor alleging physical assault by Bryant, she described leaving their shared home, frightened of further violence. “I fled my home and went into hiding,” she said. Maybe she was surprised: as a member of Congress, she turned out to still be a woman.

One critique of #MeToo, when it reached its zenith nearly a decade ago, was that the movement relied on emotionalism at the expense of reason. The overpowering moral authority of wronged women, #MeToo’s skeptics alleged, would allow cynical wrongdoers to weaponize claims of victimhood for their own gain. To some on the left, Mace, who routinely invokes her history of sexual violence as she covers for Trump and argues against the rights of trans people, might seem like a grim confirmation of this fear.

But so far Mace’s declarations have been more successful at drawing skepticism and scrutiny to herself—and to her own erratic behavior—than they have been in generating movement toward her professed goals. “Looking at the floor speech and what went on there, it’s very clear that that was the breaking point for me,” one former staffer told New York, of their decision to quit. “That’s when it became apparent to me that this is broken.” Mace’s angry colleagues have launched an Ethics Committee inquiry of their own against her; Mills has introduced his own resolution to expel her from Congress. If Mace’s adoption of feminism is cynical, then hers is a kind of cynicism that seems very naïve: to take on the role of the public survivor for the sake of personal gain, you have to believe that survivors usually get what they want. ♦