Rep. Nancy Mace’s former staffers have revealed the congresswoman was making wild demands in private long before she was having increasingly frequent public meltdowns.
The South Carolina lawmaker would demand that staffers bring liquor to her home to keep her parties going well past midnight during her first term—behavior that technically constitutes an abuse of office under House rules, unnamed sources told New York Magazine,
“When I worked for her, our poor scheduler was getting calls at two o’clock in the morning to come bring her bottles of tequila,” a former staffer told the magazine.
Mace also had her staff create burner accounts to defend her from online criticism—and to boost her hotness ranking on Reddit. The 48-year-old allegedly instructed a staffer to visit forums ranking the “hottest women in Congress” to boost her rating and comment, multiple sources told the magazine.
She was “very adamant” that the staffer upvote posts about her attractiveness, according to a former staffer.
“These allegations are so ridiculous they don’t even merit a response,” Cameron Morabito, Mace’s director of operations, told New York Magazine. “I hope she sues you for every dime you got paid to write this defamatory bullshit.”
In a video posted on X.com ahead of the article’s release, Mace called the story a “hit piece.”
“The establishment is coming after me again,” she said. “If I have enemies, good. Get in line. It means I’ve done something, it means I’ve stood for something… I’ve never been a good old boy, I never will be.”
The Daily Beast has also reached out for comment.
The allegations come as Mace, a Donald Trump loyalist who is running for governor of South Carolina, has become more erratic in public.
Last year, she accused her ex-fiancé Patrick Bryant, 51, of assaulting her and engaging in a conspiracy to drug, rape, and film other women during a speech on the House floor.
Bryant has denied the allegations and sued Mace for defamation.
During the government shutdown, she went on an expletive-laden tirade against police officers at the Charleston Airport, and earlier this month, she got in a yelling match with Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts during a House Oversight Committee meeting.
Her former staffers say they’re inclined to believe her accusations against Bryant, though they never saw anything untoward, but that they question her judgment and overall well-being. They said she drinks and uses marijuana “excessively,” and that they were scared of her.
“She would make staffers cry,” one unnamed former aide said. “She would threaten to fire them, take their money away, not give them raises, not to give them days off, religious days.”
They said she would also make her aides clean her properties that she rented out on Airbnb—including a $3.9 million home in Isle of Palms, South Carolina, and her Washington townhouse—instead of hiring a maid.
“It’s a classic story of ‘never meet your heroes,’” a different former aide said.
