Former state Rep. Aaron von Ehlinger, shown below with armed supporters, had a gun when he sexually assaulted a legislative intern.
After she reported the assault to police, he doxxed her and his supporters began harassing her. A fellow legislator “sought a copy of the police report and made inquiries into how the young woman herself could be referred for criminal charges for reporting the alleged rape.”
That’s right, an Idaho GOP legislator wanted to prosecute a rape victim for reporting the rape.
In the end, it didn’t wash. On Friday, April 30, 2022, a Boise jury convicted Ehlinger of rape. His political career already is over; he was forced to resign when the allegations surfaced. Now, he’ll likely go to prison, have to register as a sex offender, and the victim is in a good position to sue him.
It should be noted that Ehlinger was never elected to any political office, so we don’t know what Idaho citizens thought of him before all this erupted. He was appointed by the governor to fill a vacancy caused by the death of a legislator.
Idaho is one of the reddest states; Republicans hold all the major state offices and 86 of 105 legislative seats, and Trump easily won there in 2016 and 2020. And Von Ehlinger isn’t the only repulsive Republican politician that state has produced.
The lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin (profile here), now running for governor, has supported white nationalists, armed rightwing militias, and ideological attacks on schools and colleges, and frequently uses far-right rhetoric in her speeches (railing against “Marxism,” etc.). When the governor left the state to attend a governors’ conference, she unscrupulously exploited his absence to countermand the state public health agency’s Covid-19 safety mandates (details here).
Idaho is a bad state. If you’re traveling that way, I suggest flying over it or driving around it.
