Tuesday, May 1, 2018

When AJ Met Jason... Episode 2 - Updated

Many years ago I read a "dating advice for women" article in which the author implored her readers to never, ever, ever get romantically involved with a man who is separated, but not yet actually divorced, from his wife. It's good advice and I've thought of it often as I've watched the sad saga of Jason Miller and AJ Delgado play out. If you haven't been following this story as closely as I am, here are the basics. Miller and Delgado met while working on the Trump campaign in 2016:

The two began dating in mid-October, Delgado said, adding that while she knew Miller was married, he told her at the time that he was separated from his wife. 

… Their relationship, as described by Delgado, was a far cry from the torrid fling that’s been recounted in gossip columns. She showed me text messages in which the two appear to be making dinner plans, affectionately calling each other “babe” and “bae,” and casually discussing how to leave the office together without provoking suspicion among colleagues.

After Trump’s surprise victory in November, Delgado and Miller both joined the transition team, where she says their relationship continued. But just a couple of weeks after Election Day, Delgado discovered she was pregnant. She held off at first on sharing the news, unsure of how Miller would take it.

“I finally told him one night when we were in bed and I couldn’t fall asleep,” she said. 

Miller reacted calmly, Delgado recalled, but came back with some complicating news of his own. “Well this is going to be extra awkward for me to handle,” she remembers him saying, “because my wife is expecting.” From an article by reporter McKay Coppins at The Atlantic, dated August 15, 2017, read it here. 

Oops. Was Miller really separated from his wife? They were together enough in the Spring of 2016 for her to get pregnant with the child she delivered in January, 2017. Did they separate over the summer? Delgado believed so, as she told Talking Points Memo in an article dated April 7, 2018:

Miller told her that he was separated from his wife and regularly spoke with Delgado about the stress the couple’s split was causing him. He confided in Delgado about meetings he apparently had with divorce accountants and told her he was worried that his wife might move away with their daughter.

“I thought I was dating somebody who was legally separated, which people do all the time,” she said. “I never gave it a second thought, and there was no reason to.”

But that wasn’t the case, Delgado later learned. Miller and his wife were still married, and expecting a child. (Read the article here.)
Delgado is now claiming that Miller was never separated at all, saying that she became a "mistress without knowing it," but semantic purists will point out that being "legally separated from" and "still married to" can happen at the same time. Actually, and obviously, a man who is separated is, by definition, still married. To put it another way, being separated is not the same thing as being single. Not even a little bit. For what it's worth, in his article Coppins says that Miller eventually returned home to and reconciled with his wife, which implies that he had in fact been separated. On the other hand, it's also possible that Jason needed to "reconcile" with his wife after he told her he had had an affair and was about to have a child with the other woman.  

 Either way, as the author of that long-ago dating article pointed out, and as AJ learned the very hard way, a separated man (or really, any man) who wants to get romantic with a new woman may make himself sound significantly more emotionally and/or legally available than he really is. Even giving Jason the benefit of the doubt about being separated, he clearly lied by omission about the fact that his wife was pregnant.     

By Christmas, 2016, AJ and Jason's relationship was over. When he was announced as Trump's new Communications Director, AJ sent out a couple of tweets congratulating the "baby daddy" and comparing him to John Edwards. She deleted the tweets shortly after posting them but it was too late. Now the scandal was public, and Miller announced that he wouldn't be taking the job after all, in order to spend more time with his family. 

 The story went underground at that point, until last summer when Delgado's son was born. (See my post from August here.) She announced the birth on Twitter, Miller gave a quote to Page Six, and they've been duking it out in public ever since. Each claims the other is the source of the trouble, and in particular, Delgado is using Twitter to hammer Miller, presumably trying to shame him into doing the right thing: 

 Why she's putting their story on Twitter:


Here she compares her career path to Miller's, calling him a nobody/swamp dweller:
She confirms that he told her he was separated: 
Not sure what this one's about but it sounds threatening: 
Apparently Delgado was fired from her job yesterday, and she believes Miller is somehow responsible:

She goes after Miller's wife, and note that at this point, if I was Delgado's publicist (or her shrink,) I'd tell her to cool it: 


She's also posting some of the legal stuff, which probably isn't a good idea:
And one more time, why is she putting all this on Twitter: 

How will this all end? No way to know but it's going to (continue to) be painful for all concerned, not least their child. In my post about this last summer I said that I "enjoy a juicy political sex scandal and this looked like it was going to be a good one," referring to those times when there's hypocrisy (and a duplicitous politician) involved. A sanctimonious family values conservative turns out to be having an affair (Hi Eric Greitens!) or a raging homophobe turns out to have a penchant for attractive young men (Hi Mark Foley! Hi Larry Craig! Hi Dennis Hastert!) There's none of that here (well, assuming Jason Miller really was separated from his wife in 2016. And AJ has called out so-called pro-life conservatives who she feels haven't supported her after she refused to have an abortion, which she claims Miller asked her to do. She also worked for/supports Donald Trump, who has a whole host of policies that do not support families, single mothers or children. OK, maybe a little hypocrisy.) How will all this end? No way to know.

Wednesday morning update: AJ has posted another copy of a legal document, in this tweet...

... then throws some shade at Jason personally:
If it's not clear from my original post, I'm somewhat sympathetic to AJ, personally if not politically. Jason Miller appears to be a real creep and he also appears to be exploiting the fact that he has a lot more money than she does. (Apparently he was also her boss, her direct supervisor, when they were dating in October, 2016. Big. Red. Flag.) On the other hand, I also think she should stop with all the tweeting. Putting the legal paperwork out there for the whole world to see, along with the nasty tweets about Miller's wife, in particular, could very well land AJ in the land of Unintended Consequences. It probably feels good in the moment but as she learned with the "baby daddy" tweet, once it's out there it's out there. There's no way to get it back. Plus, I can only imagine how ugly things might get if Miller decides to start firing back with tweets of his own. So far he hasn't but that could change at any moment.

Update #2: As you can tell by how long this post is, I'm intrigued by this story, in a can't-look-away-from-a-train-wreck kind of way. As I was googling around this morning, trying to add to my understanding of how this all came about, I found one of the earliest articles written about it, at the Washington Post and dated Christmas Day, 2016. Titled "Transition adviser's tweets add intrigue to Trump aide Jason Miller's sudden resignation," the article doesn't confirm the existence of a Miller-Delgado baby, or even that they had a relationship, but it's clear that "I want to spend time with my family" isn't the whole story:

Twitter messages apparently posted by one of President-elect Donald Trump’s aides have added some intrigue to the sudden resignation of Jason Miller, Trump’s choice for communications director.

A tweet from the account of A.J. Delgado, an adviser to Trump’s campaign and a member of the transition team, appeared Thursday with the message: “Congratulations to the baby-daddy on being named WH ­Comms Director!” Delgado also appeared to call Miller “The 2016 version of John Edwards,” a reference to the former U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate who carried on an extramarital affair with his campaign videographer. Two other tweets called on Miller to resign — which he did.

“When people need to resign graciously and refuse to, it’s a bit . . . spooky,” one tweet read. It was followed by another saying Miller “needed to resign . . . yesterday.”

Delgado deactivated her Twitter account Saturday and could not be reached for comment ­Sunday.

Miller, who had been named Thursday to the high-level post of overseeing White House communications strategy, unexpectedly announced Christmas Eve that the West Wing job would be too demanding and he wanted to focus on his family.

…“After spending this past week with my family, the most amount of time I have been able to spend with them since March 2015, it is clear they need to be my top priority right now and this is not the right time to start a new job as demanding as White House Communications Director,” Miller said in a statement.

He added: “My wife and I are also excited about the arrival of our second daughter in January, and I need to put them in front of my career. I look forward to continuing to support the President-elect from outside after my work on the Transition concludes.”

Contacted on Sunday about the Twitter messages, Miller said in an email that “I’ll let my previous statement stand at this time.”

Delgado, an attorney, is a former columnist for Mediaite and was one of Trump’s staunchest defenders during the campaign. In early October, as some Republicans abandoned Trump after a videotape revealed lewd talk years earlier by the GOP nominee, Delgado tweeted: “Trump’s talk has zero impact on how his policies would affect Americans. But sure, let’s waste a day in the Ivory Tower feigning outrage.” She frequently defended him in TV appearances during the campaign. 

Is Miller taunting Delgado with the comment that he and his wife are excited about their second daughter? Oh you bet he is. Read the entire article here.

Update #3 on Thursday morning: In a paragraph above I said that Jason Miller hasn't tweeted anything about this situation. It turns out that's not correct, on April 24 he sent out this tweet: 


 In a tweet this morning, AJ says he was bluffing:


 Yes, I am going to continue to follow this story. 
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