In August 2020, in the middle of a re-election fight, the South Florida Sun Sentinel went looking through Brian Mast's old Facebook activity and found two comments.

The first was posted on February 23, 2009, on a vacation photo his friend Rocco LeDonni had put up from a trip to South Africa. Mast wrote:

"im so proud of you… i hope you hook up with at least fifteen 15 year olds over there…. its legel there right."

The second came on May 20, 2011. LeDonni had posted asking friends for pickup lines, joking about a radio preacher's prediction that the world would end that Sunday. Mast's answer:

"How about don't turn this rape into a murder."

Reporter Skyler Swisher published both on August 25, 2020. The posts came down after the paper contacted his campaign.

The Apology

Mast didn't deny writing them. He issued a statement:

"A decade ago when I was in the Army, and following my injury, I made disgusting and inappropriate jokes that I am embarrassed to have associated with my name today. I am sorry about that part of who I was, and I strive every day to be a better example for my kids."

He repeated that apology as the story spread through South Florida the next day.

His Democratic opponent that year, Pam Keith, put it plainly: "This is disgusting, unacceptable and dishonorable behavior for any man, let alone a sitting member of Congress. Rape, violence and intimidation of women and children are not Brian Mast's punchline."

Mast won that election. He has won two more since.

Read the Words Again

There's a version of this story where an old post is dumb-guy humor from a different decade and everyone moves on. That's not what these are, and it's worth being precise about why.

The 2009 comment isn't a crude joke about adults. It expresses hope that his friend will have sex with fifteen 15-year-old girls, followed by an aside about whether the local law would allow it. The "joke" is the legality of raping children abroad. That is what makes it a joke: the idea that you could get away with it somewhere else.

The 2011 comment takes rape as the setup and murder as the punchline. Not a euphemism. The word is right there.

He was in his late twenties and early thirties when he wrote them, not a teenager.

The Man He Wrote Them To Is Still on the Team

The person on the other end of both comments was Rocco LeDonni. By the time the Sun Sentinel published, LeDonni was Mast's campaign manager — and according to his own LinkedIn profile at the time, he had been a senior campaign adviser and political consultant to Mast since his first run for Congress in 2016.

So this wasn't an old acquaintance Mast had lost touch with. The exchange was between a congressman and the man who would go on to run his campaigns. Nobody involved thought the relationship needed reconsidering. The apology covered the words. It did not cover anything else.

What He Says He Stands For

The reason this belongs on a report card and not in a gossip column is what Mast has built his public identity on.

Two years before those posts surfaced, after the Parkland shooting, Mast wrote a New York Times op-ed saying he could not support "the primary weapon I used to defend our people being used to kill children I swore to defend." Children he swore to defend. That was the argument — that his own moral authority came from having risked everything to protect people who couldn't protect themselves. (He then voted against the assault weapons ban he'd called for, but that's a separate accounting.)

His campaign website today lists "Defending Life" and "Safer And Stronger Communities" among his priorities.

Voters are allowed to weigh that self-portrait against what the man wrote when he thought only his friends were reading.

He Faced No Consequence

Six years later, Brian Mast is the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — one of the most powerful positions in Congress, with authority over American diplomacy, arms sales and foreign aid. He is running for a sixth term in Florida's 21st District.

Nothing happened to him. No censure, no committee action, no primary challenge that mattered. The posts were deleted, a statement was issued, and the story ended.

That's the part worth sitting with. Not that a man said something monstrous online in 2009 and 2011 — people do — but that a party and a district decided in 2020 that it was priced in, and then handed him a gavel.

We deserve better.

Source

• Brian Mast joked about rape, sex with girls in social media posts — Skyler Swisher, South Florida Sun Sentinel, August 25, 2020. Photo: South Florida Sun Sentinel.