Will Folks, the former Sanford spokesman turned consultant, says someone is looking to unseal documents relating to Rep. Wallace Scarborough’s (R-James Island) divorce and an (alleged) affair, questioning whether Scarborough used his influence to seal the documents from public view.
Charleston City Paper columnist Will Moredock first noted the (alleged) affair between Scarborough and Beaufort Rep. Catherine Ceips (who had just lost her husband) in August ’06, based on documents used against Scarborough in his divorce, including cell-phone bills, private investigator reports, and a message from a posh North Carolina B&B canceling the couples weekend getaway.
Once the story broke, the response from Columbia was: “What’s the news?” One reporter embedded in the Statehouse told us that several people knew, but nobody was reporting on it.
By the time we’d gotten Scarborough on the phone for a story about the Nov. ’06 election, everything was mostly under the bridge (including his reference to us as a “rag’). Scarborough refused to speak to us because we couldn’t promise him that his divorce wouldn’t come up in our election piece. His opponent, Eugene Platt, had already told us he was going to bring up Scarborough’s initial denials of the affair and his subsequent “no comment” as an indication of questionable character.
But the weird thing is that Platt’s comments in our story may have been one of the last reports of the (alleged) affair — EVER. The State had ran a story and the Post and Courier made a handful of mentions of the scandal, but that was it.
So why, oh why, go to all the trouble of sealing the case, when the worst was behind you? It was our sense that, considering voters were certainly aware of the affair and yet still voted him back in, the story was over. But now Scarborough, the affair, and the alleged cover-up face another round of criticism (and, yet again, in an election year).
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