Mr. Wheeler provided The Times with a screenshot of the anonymous text he received that included the video, and he said he believed the tipster to be a former Cawthorn campaign aide. One other former aide, Lisa Wiggins, went public in an audio recording released by Mr. Wheeler along with her consent, saying, “All of us want the final word goal of him never serving again.”
Republicans within the state insist that accusations of lawlessness and neglect of his district are more damaging than details of his sex life. Democrats say they’re most concerned with Mr. Cawthorn’s support for the protesters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A legal effort led by North Carolina Democrats to label him as an “insurrectionist” and constitutionally disqualify him from the ballot failed last month.
However the revelations about his conduct are making a splash. The photos of Mr. Cawthorn in women’s lingerie, first published in Politico, stemmed from a bawdy game aboard a cruise that he took before he was elected to the House, said Melissa Burns, a self-described conservative Republican from Tennessee who witnessed the sport, a part of an onboard show.
For the finale, the audience was divided into teams, each of which chosen a person to decorate as a girl, “the sexier ‘she’ is, the more points you get,” Ms. Burns said in an email. Mr. Cawthorn volunteered.
The outline is consistent with an outline that Mr. Cawthorn provided in a link on Twitter, when he dismissed the photos, saying, “I assume the left thinks goofy vacation photos during a game on a cruise (taken waaay before I ran for Congress) goes to in some way hurt me?”
Ms. Burns also provided a link to a dating app for the cruise from someone identified as “Cawthorn,” using the identical photo that was published in Politico, saying, “Im in the hunt for sexy women or couples for some wild sexapades. You wont be dissatisfied.”
Luke Ball, a spokesman for Mr. Cawthorn, didn’t deny Ms. Burns’ description of the lingerie game, but he said the dating app was a fake that used the mistaken age, mistaken hometown and mistaken name of the ship.
