Opinion Wendy Davis Has a Problem With the Truth

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

Perhaps the slogan of the Wendy Davis campaign should be that behind every successful woman is a good man.

It turns out that the Texas gubernatorial candidate has been telling a version of her life story that glosses over key facts, an article by Wayne Slater in the Dallas Morning News reveals—especially the contribution to her success made by her second husband, Jeff Davis.


Wendy Davis, of course, needs no introduction. Her filibuster of a bill to ban abortion in Texas after 20 weeks—a measure that would be uncontroversial even in Belgium or France—made her an instant star for progressives and much of the media. For them, few things are as stirring as a lonely, principled stand in favor of near-infanticide.

Her personal story was also catnip for TV producers and profile writers, who were thrilled by the trajectory of the former teen mom who lived in a mobile home and eventually earned a law degree at Harvard on the way to becoming the nation’s foremost defender of late-term abortion. It’s as if the protagonist of a Horatio Alger novel pulled himself up by his bootstraps and onto the board of Planned Parenthood. What’s not to like?

Given her enormous wave of positive free media, its remarkable that Wendy Davis still felt the need to gild the lily, but so she did.

“By 19,” her website said, “Wendy was a single mother.” Actually, as Slater reported, she didn’t get divorced from her first husband until age 21. She lived in a mobile home alone for a few months after the two separated, before moving back in with her mom and then into her own apartment.

According to her website, she got through school “with the help of academic scholarships and student loans.” This is true, but elides the fact that after she married Jeff Davis, a successful lawyer 13 years her senior, he paid for her last two years at Texas Christian University and cashed in his 401(k) and took out a loan to put her through Harvard.

The marriage eventually hit the rocks. She and Jeff split in 2003. He tells Slater, “It was ironic. I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left.” When they divorced, Jeff Davis was awarded parental custody of the kids, rare in Texas, because by his account Wendy thought, “While I’ve been a good mother, it’s not a good time for me right now.”

None of this need necessarily be damning—Davis still worked hard to make the most of herself; even the best marriages are complicated; and in any case, it’s not unusual for ambitious politicians to take advantage of supportive spouses — but it wasn’t the story Davis told about herself.

In part, she exaggerated simply to make her story more dramatic and telegenic. In a profile just last week, the Today Show accompanied her back to the mobile home as if it were taking Abraham Lincoln back to the log cabin where he was raised in Spencer County, Ind. Of course, there was no visit to, let alone mention of the “historic home in the Mistletoe Heights neighborhood of Fort Worth” (in the words of the Dallas Morning News), where she was living with Jeff Davis by age 24.

There’s more at work here, though. Her version of her story has an ideological charge. So much of her allure for her feminist political base is her status as a go-it-alone single mom. That she benefited from the stability and resources of marriage can’t be allowed to muddy the picture.

The Today Show interview mentioned her second marriage, but slightingly: “[Wendy] Davis married again for a time.” For a time? She was married to Jeff Davis for 18 years!

One of the best things that happened to her, obviously, is that she got married to someone in a position to help her. But Davis and her hagiographers in the media want to make her out more as Julia, the Obama campaign-generated cartoon dependent on government for help, than as a real person who relied on the most basic institution of civil society: family.

Back before she was a feminist in battle to preserve late-term abortion, Davis was more forthright about the contribution of Jeff Davis. “He gave to me my adolescence. He gave me the opportunity to be a university student,” she told a Texas newspaper in 1996.

In response to the Slater piece, she has undertaken a desperate-feeling campaign of witless and tone-deaf pushback. She blamed the team of her opponent, Attorney General Greg Abbott, for the story. Slater tweeted, “in researching, I talked to no—zero—Abbott people.”

The Abbott campaign naturally seized on the report after its publication. Davis fumed on Twitter, “These attacks show that Greg Abbott’s completely out of touch with the struggles that I faced and so many Texans face.”

To suggest that Abbott is unfamiliar with struggle is offensively stupid. When Abbott was a law student in his 20s, he was out jogging when a tree fell on him, shattering his spine. He spent months recovering in the hospital and has been confined to a wheelchair ever since.

Davis nonetheless ended an anti-Abbott statement the other day with this flourish, “I am proud of where I came from and I am proud of what I’ve been able to achieve through hard work and perseverance. And I guarantee you that anyone who tries to say otherwise hasn’t walked a day in my shoes.”

Davis should fire herself from her own campaign if that line didn’t strike her as, at the very least, inapposite given her opponent’s disability.

Her supporters have risen to her defense, on the novel theory that it is sexist to demand that a newly minted feminist icon avoid misleading people. For them, all that really matters is her abortion extremism. Everything else is a detail, including the story of her life.

Correction: An ealier version of the article incorrectly identified Greg Abbott as lieutenant governor of Texas. He is the attorney general.