“I don’t care. I just wanna see the sex tape!” wrote ex-Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson on a porn website, Nude Africa, under the anonymous username minisoldr. After years of denying ever having a porn addiction, Robinson admitted to being a recovered porn addict in a podcast episode with “After The Call” on March 20.
Robinson’s campaign and controversial statement have had a presence on Davidson’s campus in the past for students and professors alike. During the beginning of his campaign in March 2024, the Davidson College Republicans supported him.
“We are now proud, as the Davidson College Republicans, to wholeheartedly, unapologetically endorse Mark Robinson for governor of this great state,” said the club’s then president Stephen Walker ’26 in an email to The Davidsonian when Robinson announced his campaign.
However, the club’s current president, Alexa Cohen ’27 wrote, “myself and the College Republicans were always opposed to Robinson from the get go” in an email to The Davidsonian.
As the scandal regarding Robinson and his porn site comments broke, attitudes towards him not only changed in the Republican party as many donors to his campaign pulled funding, but on campus as well. By Sept. 2024, the club also pulled their support for him.
Robinson denied all claims about the graphic comments on the porn site attributed to him in Sept. 2024 when CNN asked for his response to the accusation. Robinson claimed their reporting were lies stirred up to screw over his political career. “This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me […] This is simply tabloid trash,” Robinson said in an interview with CNN.
He attempted to sue the newsroom for libel, which CNN moved to dismiss because Robinson’s claim “does not allege any plausible theory of actual malice,” according to Politico.
However, a year and a half later, though he did not directly confess to writing the comments, Robinson decided to ‘come out’ and speak openly about his porn addiction.
“I don’t know where that fascination came from in my life, but that’s something that followed me as a young man, this obsession with pornography,” Robinson said in the podcast.
His loss in the gubernatorial race can be traced back to CNN’s reporting on the porn website comments. The main comments that made headlines include Robinson calling himself a “Black Nazi” and admitting to “peeping” on women in communal showers through vents.
Robinson maintains that, had he changed his staff over the summer, he could have survived the scandal and won the election. Melody Crowder-Meyer, associate professor of political science, disagrees.
“That story had every characteristic needed (scandal, salacious, about ‘gut’ issues that are easy to understand, etc.) to get a ton of mainstream media coverage and travel through social media to be seen by all possible voters. No campaign staff changes would have made that untrue,” Crowder-Meyer wrote in an email to The Davidsonian.
Crowder-Meyer said Stein’s margin of victory (54.9% to 40.1%) is proof that some voters can be dissuaded from voting for a candidate from their party—even if the bar is exceptionally high.
“Some members of the NC electorate (and one hopes the electorates elsewhere) do have a line that can dissuade them from voting for a fellow partisan, and Mark Robinson crossed that line,” Crowder-Meyer wrote.
Many have their own theories about why Robinson is publicly coming forward with his addiction. Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies Katie Horowitz believes him coming forward about the addiction is a strategic move to distract from his racism.
“I think Robinson’s claims of a pornography addiction are pure distraction from the virulently racist content of his posts on the porn site,” Horowitz wrote in an email to The Davidsonian. “That Robinson supported slavery, praised Mein Kampf, and identified as a Nazi all gets lost in the move to scapegoat pornography.”
“This is a familiar narrative. Countless public figures have blamed supposed porn addictions when sex scandals came to light,” she continued. This conveniently transforms pornography into the problem, shifting responsibility away from the public figure and precluding any discussion of the root issue: the misogyny that is deeply embedded in U.S. politics.”
In the episode, Robinson lamented his addiction, calling it his ‘biggest regret in life.”
“‘You had the world laid out at your feet,” he said in reference to himself. “But because you can’t shut your mouth, and because you can’t temper your tongue, and because when you were a young man, you couldn’t stand up and act like what God had created you to be … it all stopped.”
He also expressed the great mental toll the election loss had on him. In a Politico article he is quoted stating “nor do I have plans to seek elected office in the future.”
Without him seeking to run for any office in the near future, the question of why he admitted to his addiction is again raised.
In the podcast, Robinson says that he is sharing his struggles in hopes of helping others who are experiencing the same thing. “I feel like, in a lot of ways, it’s the biggest blessing that I’ve ever had,” he said. “Because now I can impart that wisdom to people.”
Professor of Political Science Andrew O’Geen believes that his podcast episode is an attempt to try and make himself employable, even if he does not plan to return to politics.
“It might simply be just about his employability, […] so one way to achieve that credibility might be for him to sort of try and address some of these concerns,” said O’Geen.
Aidan Marks ’27 contributed to reporting.