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Bloomberg plans debate attack on Sanders for past writings on ‘rape fantasies’

A top adviser to Mike Bloomberg said the former mayor would focus his attacks during Tuesday night’s debate on Bernie Sanders — including his bizarre writings from 1972 about women’s rape fantasies and kids fondling each other’s genitals.

“Bernie has loopy stuff in his background saying women get cancer from having too many orgasms or toddlers should run around naked and touch each other’s genitals to insulate themselves from porn?” Tim O’Brien told CNN’s “New Day,” prompting an incredulous anchor Alisyn Camerota to exclaim, “I’m sorry — what?”

“He has written about women’s rape fantasies, that hasn’t been surfaced. That’s the loony side of Bernie,” O’Brien replied.

The existence of the essay in the alternative newspaper the Vermont Freeman was first revealed by Mother Jones in 2015, when Sanders was making his first presidential run.





The Vermont senator, 78, was a regular contributor to the paper in the late 1960s and early 1970s and frequently wrote about sexual and cultural topics.

But it was the one essay from 1972 that caused the most controversy, despite Sanders’ later repudiation of his own words.

“Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others sexual organs, and maybe even touch them. Terrible thing! If we [raise] children up like this it will probably ruin the whole pornography business, not to mention the large segment of the general economy which makes its money by playing on people’s sexual frustrations,” Sanders wrote.

He also shared his bizarre view of what goes on in people’s heads when they were having sex.





“A man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused. A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously,” he wrote.

“Have you ever looked at the Stag, Man, Hero, Tough magazines on the shelf of your local bookstore? Do you know why the newspaper with the articles like ‘Girl 12 raped by 14 men’ sell so well? To what in us are they appealing?” he asked.

Sanders’ camp in 2015 dismissed the essay as something “stupid” Sanders wrote as a younger man and that didn’t reflect his views.

Campaign spokesman Michael Briggs called the essay a “dumb attempt at dark satire in an alternative publication” in an interview with CNN, saying it “in no way reflects his views or record on women.”





Briggs added: “It was intended to attack gender stereotypes of the ‘70s, but it looks as stupid today as it was then.”

Sanders will likely have a huge target on his back for the debate in South Carolina since emerging as the clear front-runner in most polls and winning the New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucuses.





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