You probably don’t know Rebecca Mansour by name, but there’s a good chance you’re familiar with her work. She is, after all, Sarah Palin’s ghostwriter, having penned the former Alaska governor’s autobiography, Going Rogue, in addition to being the person who actually writes her speeches and prolific Facebook missives for her.
But you have to wonder how much longer Mansour will be under the employ of the notoriously difficult Sarah Palin after the Daily Caller published a series of Twitter direct messages Mansour sent to an internet stranger I can only assume she had a crush on and was looking to impress or something, blasting all sorts of people, including her boss’ daughter, Bristol.
Reports the Daily Caller:
But by far the most incendiary messages are about Palin’s daughter Bristol. Sent in the aftermath of Bristol announcing to Us Weekly she was planning to marry Levi Johnston, Mansour wrote, “I wish they were the Cleavers too. But it’s life.”
“Two words: Patti Davis. Okay three more: Ron Reagan Junior. Two more: Billy Carter. Doesn’t your family have one?” Mansour said.
“She will hold her at arm’s length. Even Thatcher was never able to disown her screw up son Mark. It’s a Mom thing,” Mansour wrote.
Other messages, including several TheDC has chosen not to publish, reveal details about the internal dynamics of the Palin family and Mansour asking the activist whether he knew “anyone upstanding? I’m serious?” who could replace Johnston as a suitable suitor for Bristol. But Mansour did add she was “impressed” by how much Bristol Palin loved her son.
Politco’s Ben Smith said today that someone approached him months ago trying to sell the messages, but the website passed on them. The Daily Caller, however, denies that they paid for the DMs.
For her part, Mansour initially lied about having written the DMs when first confronted by the Daily Caller, only to sheepishly admit her mistakes when confronted with evidence proving otherwise.
When originally contacted by TheDC about the messages, Mansour lied and said none of them were from her. Mansour said she had already encountered the messages and accurately recalled the Twitter handle for their source.
“I did actually send him one direct message. He was asking for – it was like something really innocuous – he was just asking for information about something. And I just replied and said, ‘no’ or something like that. And then the kid then used that and started to create direct messages. And that was like a real serious thing for me because I realized anyone can do that with like a screencap,” Mansour explained.
TheDC then took steps to authenticate whether the messages were real, including logging into a Hotmail account that received email announcements from Twitter with the content of the direct messages in them. Two forensic computer analysts verified that the emails had been sent from Twitter’s servers after searching the message source code for signs of forgery.
Presented with this evidence, Mansour changed her story from an initial denial to anger (“this is really kind of skeezy”), bargaining (“can I just appeal to you to leave the Bristol stuff alone?”), and sadness at the consequences of her words (“this is going to destroy my reputation simply because people will say, ‘why were you sending a direct [message to a Palin activist]?’”).
Despite the insanity and the paranoia that seems to embody all things Palin, I still found it kind of shocking at first that Mansour would be so naive as to reveal intimate details about her life with the Palins to a stranger on Twitter. But then I read a quote at the end of the Daily Caller piece in which Mansour expresses heartbreak that “personal private conversations between myself and someone who I thought was a friend” had been revealed, and it just served to remind me that we can never underestimate the ridiculous things people will do in pursuit of the approval and affection of human beings they desperately want to have like us, whether that be on the internet or in the real world.