The real Deal: John McCain's horndog "Catholic advisor" and that one night at Tortilla Flats
A story on ABC and a similar one at the Washington Post report that a Catholic group is urging John McCain to remove Deal Hudson, director of InsideCatholic.com, who has been serving the campaign as a surrogate on Catholic issues. Hudson was at one time President Bush’s key advisor on Catholic issues, but was forced to resign from Bush’s 2004 election campaign, where he was Catholic Outreach chair of the Republican National Committee.
Deal’s 2004 resignation came as a proactive response to a profile in National Catholic Reporter, looking into what Deal called “allegations from over a decade ago involving a female student at the college where I then taught.” The college was Fordham University; in 1994, Deal resigned a tenured position in Fordham’s philosophy department.
The August 19, 2004 National Catholic Reporter article reporting the resignation links to a second piece, the same day, by the same reporter, Joe Feuerherd. Feuerherd had interviewed a woman named Cara Poppas, who in 1994 was an 18-year-old freshman at Fordham and student of Deal’s.
The link to the second article on the NCR site no longer works.
Fortunately, archive.org has the whole story, an article entitled “The Real Deal: How a Philosophy Professor With a Checkered Past Became the Most Influential Catholic Layman in George W. Bush’s Washington.” This article seems to have disappeared from the NCR site in August 2007.
From that article, here is Cara Poppas’s account of her 1994 experience with McCain’s Catholic advisor:
An 18-year-old freshman from Portland, Maine, Poppas had been in-and-out of foster homes from the age of seven. The fourth of nine children, her mother an alcoholic and her father a troubled and disabled Vietnam veteran, Poppas had a difficult childhood.
[…]
Poppas barely survived her first semester in the South Bronx. She had followed her high school boyfriend to Fordham but they broke up that fall. Her grades were terrible.
She returned home to Portland for Christmas break and in January returned to the Bronx, struggling but determined to succeed in the new year.
Poppas took a class with Hudson, which she “loved.”
In early February 1994, class concluded, she approached Hudson with a question. He suggested, she said, that they go to his office and discuss it.
“I told him everything about me,” Poppas recalled in a four-page document she provided to Fordham administrators at the conclusion of the semester. “He knew I was a ward of the court, without parents, severely depressed, and even suicidal. I discussed with him why I had lost my faith in God, in humanity, and in myself. He was extremely attentive and genuinely concerned.”
On February 15, “Fat Tuesday,” Poppas again visited Hudson at his office.
“He was in high spirits, telling me of how he had searched far and wide for the best marguerite [sic] in town,” Poppas wrote. Hudson would be meeting a group of NYU students at Tortilla Flats, a popular West Village bar where, according to a current review, “friendly waiters sometimes surprise you with free shots of tequila.”
Would Poppas care to join him?
“I was very reluctant,” wrote Poppas, who, at age 18, was still three years shy of the legal drinking age. “I knew I would be the youngest, as well as the newcomer to their frequent gatherings,” she wrote. “He promised not to tell the others my age. I decided to go.”
Poppas arrived at approximately 6 p.m.
“Five of us sat around the table, Dr. Hudson definitely controlling the conversation. Dan (young man from NYU class) was told to be ready with a lighter to light any lady’s cigarette when she wanted to smoke. Jay (another young man from NYU class) had to make sure all glasses remained full from the marguerite [sic] pitcher.”
The party progressed. More people arrived. The festive crowd played Bingo — a Tortilla Flats Tuesday night tradition. “Being that our group consisted of about ten people, we won most often. Shots of tequila would be brought in rounds to our winning table. We kept winning, and rounds of shots kept being brought.”
“As we grew more and more drunk, stranger and stranger things began to occur,” wrote Poppas. Hudson had his arms around two NYU students, said Poppas. “Dr. Hudson was heavily French kissing both girls, alternating from one to the other.”
One of the NYU students, wrote Poppas, suggested “body shots” — where “a girl places the salt on her neck, and the lime in her breasts. Then, the guy tastes the salt from the neck, takes the shot, and eats the lime from the girl’s cleavage. Dr. Hudson performed a body shot with [one of the NYU students].”
The group left the bar around midnight.
Arms locked, drunk and staggering, they dispersed. Hudson and Poppas took a cab to the Metro North train station, headed, she thought, back to Fordham.
“I was completely in Dr. Hudson’s hands,” recalled Poppas. “Not only was I unable to stand up, I had no idea as to how to get home.”
In the taxi “Dr. Hudson began pulling me close,” according to Poppas.
“On the train, he began to feel my breasts outside my sweater and coat. We missed the Fordham stop (I’m not sure whether on purpose or not). We went to his house, he put me in his car, and he went up to tell his wife he was bringing a student back to Fordham.”
Once in the car, said Poppas, “Dr. Hudson told me to lay my head on his lap, suggesting fellatio when he unzipped his zipper. I did both. I sat up and said ‘Hold on a second, wait just a minute�’ He replied ‘Yes, let’s wait till we get to my office.’”
At Fordham, “He took me into his office, laid his long coat down, and laid me down on top of it. He began touching me, unzipping my jeans and pulling up my shirt. I was just glad to be laying down, I could barely feel my body.”
Hudson performed a sexual act on Poppas. He asked her to reciprocate, which she did. “Then he took me to Sesqui, my dorm,” recalled Poppas.
The next day, Poppas continued, Hudson telephoned and asked her to lunch. He took her to McDonald’s in the South Bronx.
“He told me not to tell anyone, which I promised to. In my eyes, I was the one who had done wrong. I was the one who had acted disgustingly.”
Following the short Easter break, Poppas — ashamed, angry, and confused — returned to her usual seat at the front of Hudson’s class, having told no one about the Fat Tuesday incident.
The class, recalled Poppas’ friend and classmate Colleen Freda, was reading Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome, a sexually explicit novel. Freda thought it strange, if harmless, that Hudson wanted the students to read particularly graphic passages aloud in class, she told NCR. Poppas, however, thought Hudson was sending not-so-subtle messages right at her.
Poppas stopped attending Hudson’s class and, for that matter, most of her other classes. She spent hours curled up in her bed — not confiding the reason for her downward spiral to Freda or other friends, she told NCR. Hudson, said Poppas, was trying to contact her — calling on the phone, sending notes back to the dorm. Poppas hid.
When Poppas gave her story to the administration at Fordham, the school launched an investigation and forced Hudson to resign. In 2004, when he quit the RNC, his spokesman told NCR Hudson “left Fordham to become the publisher and editor of Crisis magazine in Washington, DC, and expressed to various [Crisis] board members his desire to move his family south and try a career outside academia.”
In 2004, Hudson was gleeful about his role in costing the job of Ono Ekeh, a “low level employee” at the Secretariat for African-American Catholics, and father of three, who had hosted a “Catholics for Kerry” Internet forum. Hudson told NCR’s Feuerherd, “If you’re going to play in the sandbox, then you have to take the consequences of your public utterances and your public actions.”
Bonus: Add John McCain’s slimy “Catholic advisor” Deal Hudson as your friend on Facebook! Or, just send him a message!
