KFOR-TV screenshot

It’s hard to keep count of the barrage of terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad sexual abusers who have been outed this year, so let me reintroduce you to Ralph Shortey, the deplorable former Oklahoma state senator who pleaded guilty last week to federal charges of child sex trafficking.




On Tuesday, Oklahoma police released bodycam footage that shows the deplorable ex-senator the moment he was caught in a hotel room with a 17-year-old boy.

As the New York Daily News reports, the cops’ discovery of Shortey and the minor at a Super 8 Motel prompted an investigation that ultimately found that the 35-year-old Republican lawmaker had “offered a teenage boy cash in exchange for ‘sexual stuff.’”


The police bodycam footage was filmed in the early-morning hours of March 9 during a welfare check. Shortey answered the door with two unmade beds behind him; cops remarked on the strong smell of marijuana, to which the married father of four responded, “I’m just trying to have a good evening.”



Sir, having a good evening is putting on your Korean sheet mask and watching Living Single reruns. It might involve weed (or a cannabis bath bomb). It absolutely never involves a 17-year-old in a motel room—even when I was 17.



But that’s not it (because 2017): Shortey answers the door wearing a T-shirt citing a GOTDAMN BIBLE VERSE. It’s not just any Bible verse, of course; it’s Ephesians 5:22 (“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord”), with a drawing of a sandwich (you know where this is going) with the caption, “Now go make me a sandwich.”


KFOR-TV reports that, at one point, Shortey, who served as Donald Trump’s Oklahoma campaign chair, snaps back at the cop when the officer points out that a juvenile is in the room.

“Can you show me that he’s only 17?” Shortey, glistening in privilege and au-damn-dacity, asks the officers.


“I can’t,” one of the cops responds. “But I can convince you that he is. I can put you in handcuffs and throw you in the back of [a] car.”

The officers didn’t do that, though. Shortey wasn’t arrested (how? HOW?), although the exchange did spark an investigation into the former state senator’s affairs. Shortey ended up being charged with child prostitution in Cleveland County, Okla., a charge that forced him to give up his Senate seat.


As the Daily News reports, the state charges were dropped in September in exchange for federal charges of child sex trafficking and child pornography (a charge that would later be dropped once Shortey pleaded guilty to trafficking).

Yet to be sentenced, Shortey is looking at a minimum of 10 years to life in prison.


Read more at the New York Daily News and KFOR-TV.