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  • 2016-11-29 (xsd:date)
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  • Trump's Latest Staff Pick Outed Dying Gay Brother? (en)
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  • On 28 November 2016, the Washington Blade posted a story reporting that Fox News analyst Kathleen Troia KT McFarland, who has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as his deputy national security adviser, outed her gay brother who was, at the time, dying of AIDS. Multiple other publications followed suit with similar headlines. However, the stories link back to a 2006 profile in New York Magazine, where McFarland clearly did not want to speak about her brother. It was the magazine that dug up letters she had written to her parents more than a decade earlier: The profile was published while McFarland was in the midst of an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to be the Republican nominee challenging an incumbent Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate seat in New York. Clinton would go on to win against John Spencer, who beat McFarland in the primaries. The story line accusing McFarland of cold-heartedly outing her dying brother seems to be an attempt at unfairly painting her in a negative light — and it is nothing new. The New York Post went with the same theme at the time, cribbing off the same New York Magazine article, in a 25 June 2006 story headlined, Hill Foe 'KT' outed her dying brother. But the reality around the circumstances are much more complicated, having to do with a troubled family history and a letter that was made public against her will during the throes of a political campaign. With the New York Magazine story looming, McFarland's camp scrambled to get ahead of the story, contacting the New York Times a week before it was published to give her side. She released a statement to the Times saying that she grew up in a physically abusive household, and on the advice of a therapist, wrote two candid letters to her parents in 1992, which somehow surfaced and were made public more than a decade later. Her statement to the Times read: Her mother, when contacted by the Times, refused to comment. McFarland recounted snippets of what was an apparently painful family history, while noting that whatever her relationship was with her brother, she never had any intention of making his personal affairs public: Thus, the argument can be made that by publishing the contents of personal, inter-family communications, New York Magazine outed McFarland's brother, not McFarland. While it remains unclear whether her letters were ever actually delivered, it does remain possible that she outed her brother to her parents. However, we have no definitive proof of that, as McFarland's mother denied knowledge of them. (en)
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