Watch: Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson’s full RNC speech
The full speech by Mark Robinson, Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina, at the 2024 Republican National Convention.
North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson on Thursday denied a shocking CNN report about alleged comments he left on a pornographic website. North Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial candidate insists he will not drop out of the race for governor.
“I can reassure you: What you are about to see in this story does not come from Mark Robinson,” he said in a video on X. He also accused Josh Stein, North Carolina’s attorney general and Robinson’s Democratic opponent, of leaking the story.
USA TODAY has reached out to Robinson’s campaign for more information. USA TODAY has also reached out to Stein’s campaign.
The report is comprehensive. CNN accuses Robinson of frequently visiting a pornographic website between 2008 and 2012 and posting a series of comments that were sexually explicit, racist, transphobic or otherwise offensive.
He is said to have spoken about looking at naked women in public showers at gyms as a 14-year-old boy. The newspaper reported that he said he enjoyed pornography featuring transgender people. The allegations extend to offensive remarks about a celebrity having an abortion and a woman being sexually harassed by a taxi driver.
CNN reported that Robinson also specifically criticized Martin Luther King Jr. and repeatedly made obscene insults about the civil rights icon. He is also said to have said that he was not a member of the Ku Klux Klan because blacks were not allowed there. If he were a member of the hate group, he would call King the devil and insult him with another racist slur.
The newspaper also reported that Robinson called himself a “black Nazi” and supported slavery in the United States to some extent, and that he supported Nazi leader Adolf Hitler over the leadership of then-President Barack Obama.
CNN said it used email addresses and biographical information in its reporting, such as Robinson’s birth and wedding dates, his length of service in the Army and other context linking Robinson to the online comments. The account identified by CNN wrote in 2011 that her mother worked at a black college and university and Robinson’s mother worked at North Carolina A&T State University, an HBCU.
When asked for a reaction, the Trump campaign did not mention Robinson’s name in a statement from national press secretary Karoline Leavitt: “President Trump’s campaign is focused on winning the White House and saving this country. North Carolina is an essential part of that plan. We are confident that President Trump will win the Tarheel State again when voters compare Trump’s record of a strong economy, low inflation, a secure border and safe roads with the failures of Biden-Harris. We will not take our eye off the ball.”
The report caused a stir because the conservative Robinson had criticized abortion rights and transgender rights during the election campaign. In February, he called for the government to arrest transgender people if they use gender-specific toilets.
Earlier this year, Stein launched a commercial in which Robinson rails against access to abortion.
“Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers,” Robinson, the current lieutenant governor of North Carolina, said in a Facebook livestream in 2019. “It’s about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”
The ad also included a 2020 clip of Robinson telling a church congregation that he had “no compromise on abortion,” as well as a clip from a February 2023 radio interview in which Robinson said if he became governor, he would propose a bill banning abortion “for any reason.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Contributors: Rachel Barber and Savannah Kuchar, USA TODAY
