More Odd Tales From The World Of Christine O’Donnell
The Weekly Standard has an article up today detailing a multi-million dollar gender discrimination lawsuit that Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell filed against her former employer. In addition to the facts of the lawsuit itself, which are detailed in the article, it also appears that O’Donnell is up to her old game of embellishing her academic records:
According to the amended complaint, O’Donnell had considered not taking the ISI job because “she had applied for admission to a Master’s Degree program at Princeton University, to start in the fall of 2003, and was concerned that the ISI position would not fit with her plans.”
But, in fact, O’Donnell had not yet received her bachelor’s degree at that time and had not been accepted to a master’s program at Princeton.
The Delaware News Journal reported on Saturday: “[O’Donnell’s] alma mater, Fairleigh Dickinson University, sued her in 1994 for about $4,000 in unpaid tuition. She satisfied the debt in 2003 and received her diploma this month after completing an additional course.” O’Donnell’s campaign manager Matt Moran acknowledged in an email received at midnight Saturday that O’Donnell “was not admitted to a Masters Degree program at Princeton. She took an undergraduate non-matriculated class at PU on constitutional government.” Moran has not yet replied to a subsequent email asking why O’Donnell claimed “ISI violated its promise to allow Miss ODonnell time to take Master’s degree classes at Princeton in return for a salary as small as $65,000 for her credentials and expertise, and as a result of ISI’s breach of its agreement, Miss O’Donnell was forced to quit her courses at Princeton, losing her time and money invested in this course of study at Princeton. [emphasis added].”
O’Donnell decided to drop the lawsuit in 2008, claiming that she couldn’t afford the legal fees. “I definitely felt that there was gender discrimination,” O’Donnell told me in a September 2 phone interview, but she declined to elaborate. “I believe that right now that if we unite in the conservative movement, the bigger picture is at stake, and we need to put that behind us.”
Still, the implication that O’Donnell was accepted to a master’s degree program at Princeton is the latest of many false statements to come to light in recent weeks. Conservative radio host Dan Gaffney challenged O’Donnell on September 2 for claiming she had won two out of three counties in Delaware when she ran for Senate in 2008. In fact, she didn’t win any.
According to her financial disclosure form, O’Donnell only made $5,800 last year. “I made more than $5,800,” O’Donnell told me in the September 2 interview, but said she did not have to and would not disclose how much.
With just a little more than 48 hours to go until the polls close, and hints from Public Policy Polling that the poll they will release later tonight will show the race between O’Donnell and Castle to be a close one, Delaware Republicans ought to think long and hard about Christine O’Donnell before they go vote. Otherwise, they could be throwing out an opportunity to win a Senate seat by backing a candidate who appears to be nothing more than a gadfly.
