Sullivan calls reported behavior ‘sad and disturbing’
Mary Peltola’s campaign on Thursday pushed back against a New York Times report that the Democratic Senate nominee used slurs and shoved a staffer while serving in the U.S. House, calling the article exaggerated and attributing any troubling behavior to grief over the 2023 deaths of her husband and mother.
The Times article, published Wednesday, was based on text messages and interviews with nine former employees of Peltola. She represented Alaska in the House from 2022 until the beginning of last year, lost re-election to the House in 2024 and is now the Democratic nominee against two-term Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan in the November 3 midterm elections.
In a statement, Harry Child, a spokesperson for Peltola’s campaign, said her conduct had been shaped by the stress of serving in Congress alongside the death of her husband in a 2023 plane crash and the death of her mother around the same time.
“At the time of their passing, Mary was parenting kids through their own grief, serving full-time in the US House of Representatives thousands of miles from home, and running a competitive re-election campaign – all while shouldering the enormous burden of grief,” Child said.
“Like any person who has gone through multiple personal tragedies in the span of a few months, Mary sometimes struggled to deal with her grief. But she treats her staff with respect and care, and she maintains close positive relationships with her staff spanning her nearly 30 years in public service.”
Child added that “exaggerating and outright lying about moments from the hardest period of her life, and falsely presenting them as a pattern of behavior, is wrong.”
Sullivan, speaking to reporters at the U.S. Capitol, called the reported behavior “sad” and “disturbing.” “Young Alaskans went through a lot of abuse and I’m sure there’s a hell of a lot more than was just reported in that story,” he said.
The contest is one of Democrats’ top targets as they seek to flip at least four seats to retake the Senate in the November 3 midterms. Democrats have named Alaska a priority alongside Maine, North Carolina and Ohio.
Other former aides who spoke to the Times offered a more favorable portrait of Peltola. Paul Horner, who served as Peltola’s finance director in 2022 — when she won both a special election and a general election to claim Alaska’s at-large House seat — called her “one of the finest human beings that I’ve ever worked for.”
Tyson Fick, a special assistant who advised Peltola on fishing policy during her House tenure, described her as “awesome and demanding” while acknowledging that she occasionally “raised her voice.” Fick said Peltola had been dealing with grief during her time in Congress, and that staffers unfamiliar with how people behave in commercial-fishing environments may have misinterpreted her demeanor — a setting she had previously worked in.