Since then, the Alabama press corps has been all over their tall, gangly governor, piecing together the details of a romance that has been best described by one Birmingham columnist as “wretch inducing.” But the intergenerational canoodling is in many ways the least interesting part of the scandal. Bentley and his paramour have spun around themselves a web of deceit that includes “dark money,” taxpayer-funded trips together, untraceable “burner” cell phones, and a shared safe deposit box. Now the state legislature is considering impeachment, and the lovers are being hunted by a handful of state and federal law enforcement agencies.

Bentley was a long shot to win the governor’s race in 2010. A dermatologist by trade, he was elected to the first of four terms in the Alabama House in 2002, representing Tuscaloosa. More or less a backbencher for those eight years, he went into the seven-candidate Republican primary in 2010 as an underdog. But the Republican establishment fought over two favorites, former state Senator Bradley Byrne and Tim James, son of former Governor Fob James. Billing himself as a kind of country doctor who could cure the state’s ills, Bentley promised to not draw a state salary until the state reached full employment. He snuck in between Byrne and James, claiming second by a mere 208 votes and earning a spot in a runoff. By then, Byrne had been badly damaged by the James campaign, and Bentley’s clean-Christian-outsider persona propelled him easily to the nomination. Then, amid the Hubbard-run campaign for Republicans to seize control of the legislature, he sailed into the governor’s mansion.

In a state where all three branches of government are caught up in scandal, it was only natural that the governor would seize on a criminal corruption trial as an opportunity for good PR.

Days after his inauguration, speaking at a Sunday service at Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery, where Martin Luther King, Jr. served as pastor, he said, “Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.” A reporter present asked if he meant to insult people of other faiths, and Mason, then his communications director, stepped in to say, “He is the governor of all the people, Christians, non‑Christians alike.”

A former beauty queen, Mason had represented Northwest Community College in the 1990 Miss Alabama Pageant. After college, she worked in broadcast news at small stations around the state. She met and married Jonathan Mason, a meteorologist at WVUA in Tuscaloosa, where Rebekah worked as anchor and news director. The two attended First Baptist Church of Tuscaloosa, where they became friends with Bentley and his wife, Dianne. The Masons got out of the news business to form a pair of advertising businesses, Caldwell Mason Marketing and JRM Enterprises Inc., and they helped Bentley on his campaigns. After he won the race for governor, he took them both to Montgomery with him, appointing Rebekah as his chief communications officer and Jonathan as director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Despite having no government experience, he oversees the distribution of more than 4 million federal pass-through dollars each year, for which he drew a starting salary of $77,000 and is now being paid more than $98,000. Over the same period, his business JRM Enterprises has received $274,600 from the University of Alabama system, with much of it coming mysteriously through PayPal. In her two and a half years of being directly employed by the governor’s office, Rebekah made a little over $161,000.