Live by the code and die by the code, and now it’s up to Colorado GOP Senate candidate Darryl Glenn to decide which way he’s going to go with that.
Glenn, a Colorado Springs county commissioner — and winner of one of the biggest and nastiest Republican brawls ever in the state, to take on incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet — has stumbled over a story about his past.
A few media outlets, most notably the Denver Post, have been pressing Glenn to talk about the discrepancy between his claim that he’s never been arrested, and 1983 court documents signed by him that show he once faced assault charges in Colorado Springs when he was 18.
Glenn had been dismissive of the questions and the story for weeks, according to a story by Denver Post reporter Joey Bunch. But when Bunch uncovered documents about the case and confronted Glenn, the Senate hopeful said that there was possibly another Darryl Glenn responsible for the assault. He said the assault might have been committed by his now-deceased half-brother. He repeatedly denied he was ever arrested or accused of assault and said there was nothing he could recall in his past to account for it. He maintained that he’d “never been arrested nor ever questioned by police,” Bunch wrote.
This, despite being shown court documents from the case clearly bearing his signature, something a Post-hired handwriting expert backed up. Both Glenn and supporters have attacked the Post and Bunch for doing their job: detailing the lives of political candidates, checking sources, checking stories and reporting what they find. We do it every year, for every candidate, and we go the extra mile in big statewide races like Glenn’s. An aversion to scrutiny is a problem for a Senate race, especially when stories get sideways.
When Glenn’s story started falling apart, he suddenly remembered, he said.
It turns out Glenn tragically lived in a home rife with domestic violence, and he said it might have been that during one episode where police were called to the house, his father might have wrongfully accused Glenn of assault as he stepped in to protect his mother. In a statement to the Post, Glenn said that the home and his life were marred by frequent episodes of domestic assault, and it all becomes an unremarkable blur that someone in those circumstances doesn’t remember.
“When you grow up in a violent home, the fights, the screaming, the pain all blur together. To survive, you block as much of it out of your head as you can in the moment. You try to forget it going forward. What happened that night was one in a long series of incidents between my parents. In that sense, it was not really memorable,” Glenn wrote to the Post.
The explanation for the assault charge is tragic and makes the allegation totally excusable. But it’s not what Glenn said, and his new excuse seriously defies logic and leads back directly to a few weeks ago when another Republican Air Force graduate stumbled among political and ethical semantics.
During the Republican fracas that eventually handed the GOP nomination to Glenn in June, the feisty former Air Force Academy graduate clobbered his favored political opponent Jon Keyser with a similar stumble. Keyser’s campaign was badly shaken when it was revealed a petition gatherer had forged numerous signatures, and there was a possibility that a case could be made Keyser didn’t have enough valid signatures to make the primary ballot. After a lot of waffling and story changing and dramatically blaming of the media, Keyser said he wouldn’t step down, despite demands to do so by Glenn, who said that any Air Force Academy graduate would do so because of the Academy’s honor code to do the right thing. When Keyser refused, Glenn acidly fired at him: “I’m sure the Academy will appreciate that answer.”
That code that Glenn skewered Keyser with? “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.”
Glenn maintains that his amnesia is no lie, and that he offered up explanations about another Darryl Glenn, whom he told reporters causes him consternation on a regular basis, and about his half-brother, without even giving any thought to how regular police run-ins at his family home might have been part of the court case. And his criticism of Bunch and the media for even pursuing the story, especially after it started falling apart? Just another political hopeful doing his part to point out how bent the media is.
For most people, this probably seems like a lot of worry for nothing. He was 18 and really a victim himself. I’m sympathetic to Glenn for having to live through such a tormented life and rising above it.
But as he pointed out, Air Force Academy graduates aren’t most people. They have to be honest to a fault, as he famously pointed out to Keyser, rather than trying to find fault with a reporter just doing his job.
I’m willing to let it go and give Glenn another chance, but the question is, as a former cadet, should he?
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com.