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Madison -- After the alleged victim recanted Monday, police are dismissing an allegation that a volunteer for a GOP congressional campaign was beaten for being a gay Republican.

As a result, the campaign of Republican Chad Lee said it was dismissing the volunteer because he had misled them about the alleged incident.

Before that Monday, the conservative website Media Trackers posted and then retracted a story that alleged that days before the attack the recanting volunteer had received threatening text messages from the husband of openly gay Democratic candidate for Congress Mark Pocan of Madison. The conservative website never checked with the Pocan campaign before running with the story.

Tamara Packard, an attorney for Philip Frank, Pocan's husband, said Monday that her client had not sent any such text messages, didn't know the victim and was considering a libel lawsuit.

The victim was not identified by Madison police but conservative media such as Media Trackers, the Daily Caller, Wisconsin Reporter, and Christian Schneider, a conservative blogger for the opinion section of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel all identified him as Kyle Wood, a volunteer for the campaign of Chad Lee, Pocan's Republican challenger.

The Madison police late Monday updated an earlier report they had released last week describing Wood's original allegation.

"In an interview this afternoon with Madison Police detectives, the victim in this case recanted his earlier statements in regards to this crime. This crime, alleged to have occurred on High Street in the South Police District, will be cleared as 'Unfounded' for case reporting purposes," the police statement read. "Once follow up investigation is completed, MPD's case file will be reviewed with the Dane County district attorney's office."

The Lee campaign put out a statement Monday night saying that Wood had been dismissed.

"Today, our campaign unfortunately learned that a deeply troubled volunteer misled police, news outlets, and our own team in regards to an attack at his home that apparently never occured," the statement read. "Our campaign dismissed Mr. Wood immediately and we will fully cooperate with the authorities as they continue with their investigation. As the Madison Police Department is investigating this matter, we cannot comment further at this time."

Wood didn't respond to requests for comment Monday but over the weekend he told Schneider, the conservative blogger, that he had received threats and putdowns for being a gay Republican opposing Pocan.

“It probably had something to do with the fact that I support a Republican candidate running against an openly gay man,” Wood said of the attack.

Wood claimed the attack occured on Wednesday morning when an unidentified man knocked on his door and then brutally attacked him as soon as Wood answered it.

Following that news, Media Trackers printed damaging allegations about "a series of shocking text messages purportedly from Philip Frank," Pocan's husband. Media Trackers printed the whole series of text messages, which were laced with threats, sexual innuendo and racist language and which were supposedly sent to Wood just days before the alleged attack on him.

“Remember your station in life and remember not to cross the husband of a powerful man. You are on shaky footing as it is, push much farther and you won’t have a future in this town, or any other," one of the supposed messages reads.

Brian Sikma, the Media Trackers blogger who wrote the item and who regularly accuses mainstream journalists of sloppy and biased reporting, said his story was based on information from Wood. Sikma said Wood's "conduct is unacceptable and such actions have no place as a part of our public debate," but Sikma made no mention of his own role in the allegation against Frank getting onto the Internet.

Sikma said that Media Trackers had also talked with workers in Lee's campaign and other unnamed individuals who knew Wood "in an attempt to verify his personal integrity." Sikma refused to say whether Media Trackers had reached out to Pocan's campaign before running the story.

But Dan McNally, Pocan's campaign manager, said Media Trackers never contacted the campaign. He had no other comment.

Packard, Frank's attorney, sent a letter to Media Trackers on Monday before the story was retracted. Packard said that Wood's story was a "bald-faced lie" and that a libel suit was "certainly on the table as one option."