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The political rehabilitation of Andrew Gillum has begun in earnest.
The disgraced Democratic politician sat down with syndicated TV host Tamron Hall for an interview, his first since the episode in Miami Beach.
In March, the 2018 Florida Democratic nominee for governor was found passed out naked in the floor of a Miami Beach hotel room with two men — one of them being a male escort. When the police were called, crystal meth and other drugs were found in the room.
(To this day, no one has been charged for the drugs.)
The police report said that Gillum was so inebriated that he could not communicate, and evidence seen in an infamous photo of the room suggests the married politician and father of three had engaged in sex with the escort.
According to reports, Gillum’s wife brokered his first sit-down interview with Hall — she is also being interviewed. The full interview will be aired Monday.
Gillum would apologize for his actions, and announce that he was entering alcohol rehab and would be stepping away from public life.
“I have made the decision to seek help, guidance and enter a rehabilitation facility at this time. This has been a wake-up call for me. Since my race for governor ended, I fell into a depression that has led to alcohol abuse,” he said at the time.
As for stepping away, that was six months ago almost to the day.
“When that photo came out, I didn’t recognize the person on the floor,” Gillum told Hall, before playing the victim card.
“That was not anything more than a person being at their most vulnerable state, unconscious, having given no consent, and someone decided to use a moment where I was literally lying in my own vomit,” he added.
The photo is seen here:
This is the police body cam photo of Andrew Gillum unconscious naked in the hotel room. pic.twitter.com/SYGNipRsGw
— Black History Guy (@BArchaeologist) March 21, 2020
Gillum spoke of the guilt he felt after the incident, revealing to Hall that he has “cried every day” since then.
“It is normal to feel guilty for the harm you have caused someone. That’s how you know you’re human. That’s how you know you’re not a sociopath,” he said.
“So much of my recovery has been about trying to get over shame,” Gillum shared. “Shame is not that I did that, but I am bad.”
As for being in a room with a male escort who worked as a gay porn actor, Gillum had this to say:
“I would say the reason why I went to that room was probably no different than how anybody might communicate with someone that they are in a friendship relationship whatever with. I understand very well what people assume about that.”
Gillum again attributed his loss in 2018 as the tipping point.
“I totally underestimated the impact that losing the race for governor had on my life, and on the way that those impacts started to show up in every aspect of my life,” he said. “It was a constant reminder of failure and my own personal failures… It was a reminder that I had let so many people down.”
“All of that was all of a sudden gone, and caused me to think about my own purpose, and my own value and what I could contribute if anything,” he added. “I didn’t want to face any of those things so I numbed. I tried to suppress. I tried to ignore.”
As for future aspirations, Hall suggested that the public will be hearing more from him.
“I do believe he wants to, in some way, have his voice heard,” she said.
Gillum had $3 million in leftover campaign contributions from his gubernatorial run and pledged to use the money to “flip Florida blue” by registering new voters.
The Tallahassee Democrat reported in May that the fund was down to $1.76 million and that “a substantial sum — around $650,000 — has gone to legal fees.”
You have to give Democratic politicians credit, there’s little that will stop them from running for office… and little that will cause their base to reject a candidate.
Just look to the later Marion Barry, the former D.C., mayor who was arrested in 1990 on charges of possession of cocaine and served a six-month sentence in jail.
In what the media has characterized as “one of the most improbable comebacks in the history of American politics,” Barry would eventually be elected to yet another term as mayor in the city — in a far less permissive time.
He first ran for a city council seat under the slogan, “He may not be perfect, but he’s perfect for D.C.”
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The longest-tenured writer at BizPac Review, Tom grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills.
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