Under the continued pressure of Democratic questions about how he spent his years in the outsider Baylor University student group NoZe Brotherhood, Republican Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul has started to to respond to the claims about his college career leveled at him by his Democratic opponent, Jack Conway.
And for the first time I could find, he appears to be flatly denying the Aqua Buddha story. At first, Paul refused to address the incident — in which an anonymous woman claims he and a friend tied her up, put her in a creek and asked her to worship “Aqua Buddha” as part of what the accuser calls “a hazing prank” — at all, preferring to focus his attention on slamming Conway for making the story into a campaign commercial.
That changed slightly this week, when Paul took to the conservative airwaves and said, basically, he has no recollection of the Aqua Buddha incident.
In an interview with Fox’s Megyn Kelly today, he repeated that ‘I don’t remember’ claim at first — but then appeared to refute the story completely.
“I’m being attacked for someone’s anonymous accusations of what I might have done in college, which I did not do in college,” Paul told Kelly. “So the thing is, it’s not only what you did in college, it’s someone anonymously saying you did something in college … it’s like when someone comes up to you and says, ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’”
Watch:
The TPM Poll Average shows Paul leading the race by a margin of 47.1-42.6.
Evan McMorris-Santoro
Evan McMorris-Santoro has covered politics for TPM since 2009. Before that, he was a reporter at National Journal’s Hotline covering election 2008. He started his career covering local politics at newspapers in TN and his native NC.
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