Of course the Anitere Flores-Oscar Braynon affair is news! And other thoughts on the latest Tallahassee sex scandal

Sen. Anitere Flores looks at a message on the phone of Sen. Oscar Braynon on the Senate floor Thursday, June 8, 2017 at the Capitol in Tallahassee,. Photo by Phil Sears.

In the Wednesday edition of Florida Playbook, author Marc Caputo makes a very good point, but screws up another about a sex scandal involving two married senators — one of them the chamber’s highest-ranking Democrat and the other a powerful Republican.

“The Braynon-Flores affair is different from the (Jack) Latvala, (Stephen) Bittel and (Jeff) Clemens cases,” Caputo argues. He couldn’t be more right. Those scandals were about sexual assault and harassment, whereas the affair between Oscar Braynon and Anitere Flores is one between two consenting adults.

Where Caputo is wrong is when he writes, “Their affair wasn’t news until they decided to publicly address it.”

That’s baloney.

The Braynon-Flores affair is newsworthy on several levels and them publicly addressing it the way they did — with a terse, joint statement — only served to raise more questions. Methinks Caputo is dismissive of the newsworthiness of this story because, for once, he did not have the scoop.

Keep this in mind, the domain name of the anonymous website that outed Braynon and Flores had been up for twenty days before it was discovered. A source close to the situation tells me that Braynon and Flores did not retain public affairs firm Sachs Media Group until AFTER a tweet highlighted the site. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom that the two lawmakers were prepared to have their relationship outed after the first stories about Clemens’ affair broke in November.

But all of that is beside the larger points.

This scandal is news because this is the fourth and fifth time since November 2016 that a Florida Senator has been forced to admit to inappropriate behavior. There’s only forty of them in the upper chamber, so this is a high percentage. And Braynon and Flores will probably not be the last to have to cop to bad behavior.

There are two other state Senators who, in the past, have aggressively sexually harassed women in The Process. That’s not supposition. That’s from the women themselves who, to this day, remain afraid to speak out against these men out of fear to what may happen to their careers.

Of course, what Braynon and Flores did is, as Caputo would argue, not on the same level as sexual harassment, but it is, as Richard Corcoran would undoubtedly argue, part of the problem with the Senate.

It’s the arrogance. It’s the lying. It’s the forcing of others to go along with the whole charade.

Am I overstating the matter? I don’t think so. Imagine that you are a lobbyist and you have first-hand knowledge of the Braynon and Flores relationship. That gives you enormous power. Suddenly two powerful lawmakers are beholden to your silence. This begs the question: What happens when you go to Braynon or Flores on the last day of Session and ask them to tuck X into bill Y? They can’t possible say no.

Braynon and Flores will argue that this scenario has never happened. But they’ve been lying to everyone for the past, what, four years about their relationship. So now we’re suppose to take them at their words?

Don’t forget that Braynon was in charge of the Senate Democrats’ campaign efforts in 2016 when Flores was up for re-election. While some Democratic campaign experts, like Matt Isbell, who will argue that the Democrats put up a good fight, if not did all they could do, against Flores. But how does anyone really know that? Could Braynon and the Democrats, even in losing, have forced the Republicans to spend more of their budget defending Flores and thereby kept some money from flowing to more competitive races?

It’s questions like these that make this story newsworthy. And the two lawmakers’ pleading for “privacy” is simply ridiculous.

At this point, it looks like Jeff Clemens may have handled his scandal the best of any of these politicians. He resigned from office almost immediately after the story broke, even though his scandal did not involve any level of harassment (although it did involve an unbalanced power dynamic). As his political career was crumbling around him, Clemens recognized it was best to go home and salvage his private life.

That is what is so amazing about Braynon and Flores. On the same day they deliver the ultimate embarrassment to their loved ones, they also delivered a response to the governor’s state of the speech (Braynon) and sat in the Senate chambers and cheered on the Senate President (Flores).

If that was your husband or wife, do you think that’s the best place for them to be?

If that was your husband or wife, do you really want him or her to meet up with their boyfriend/girlfriend to issue a joint statement.

Hell no. They would be at home, eating the big pile of sh*t you absolutely deserved to give to them for however long you want to serve it to them.

Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Lee, missed the first day of Session because his “responsibilities as a father kept (him) from being in Tallahassee.”

Yet, Braynon and Flores, presumably with much bigger fires to put out at home, went about their business as lawmakers.

In their joint statement, Braynon and Flores emphasize not once but twice how they want to move past this to focus on “the important work ahead.”

If you are the loved one of one of these lawmakers, are you really comfortable with them working long hours away from home? Flores is at the center of several important legislative debates, including many issues important to the insurance industry. How can this not be a distraction?

Honestly, I hate writing about this crap.

I’ve hated being in Tallahassee these past three days because the stench of scandal hangs over the Capitol like the morning fog. It’s absolutely toxic. Men and women who have been longtime friends don’t know whether to hug each other or give one another a fist bump. People speak in incomplete sentences out of fear of saying the wrong thing.

Everyone is on edge.

Everyone is already counting down the days to Sine Die. That usually doesn’t happen until the horses pass the second post.

There are 59 days left before they drop the handkerchiefs.

See if you can hold your breath until then.