After Republican Kansas U.S. Senator Roger Marshall’s attack ad alleging that Democratic nominee Adam Hamilton “protected a pedophile” who volunteered at his church camps aired during Sunday’s Chiefs game, Lea Ann Combs’ phone lit up.
“It looks like he is saying that this happened at Tall Oaks when it did not happen at Tall Oaks,” said Combs, who’s on the board of directors for Tall Oaks Camp and Conference Center in Linwood, Kansas.
After the ad used a photo from Tall Oaks under text and narration about reported child abuse at a fall camp and an alleged cover-up, a lawyer representing the camp and conference center sent Marshall’s campaign a cease and desist. Combs said she had no idea where Marshall’s campaign got the photo.
The ads focus events from the early 2000s, which initially came up the primary. One of Hamilton's opponents alleged that Hamilton helped cover up a child sex abuse scandal at his church camps.
There were two instances where the same church volunteer attempted to assault campers, in 2005 and 2006.
Hamilton told Kansas Reflector there was no attempt at a cover-up, but he’d approach the first incident differently today by going directly to law enforcement.
After the 2005 incident, the church conducted an internal investigation — but after the victim couldn’t identify the perpetrator, it was inconclusive. In 2006 church leaders told law enforcement after the same perpetrator acted again and was identified.
“The Adam Hamilton child molestation cover-up happened at a place different than the stock image of a camp that was used,” Brent Robertson, senior advisor to Marshall’s campaign, said in a statement. “The image has already been corrected, and luckily Kansas families care far more about Hamilton’s failure to protect kids from a child sex predator than what cabin picture was used.”
Late Monday afternoon, Marshall’s campaign released a new version of the ad on Facebook.
However, Combs said that she saw the original ad — after it was supposedly corrected — three times in 10 minutes on KMBC 9 news. Marshall’s campaign did not respond to a follow-up question on plans to remove the ad from streaming by the publishing of this story.
Tall Oaks wants an apology.
Joe Spinello, owner of The Valley Cabins in Lacygne, Kansas, also wasn’t aware images of his business were being used until the Kansas News Service called early Monday afternoon. Spinello and his wife, Jamie, who own the cabins together, were in the process of asking for the image to be removed when Marshall’s campaign released the new version.
Both businesses — and court documents — say the reported abuse mentioned in the ad didn’t happen on their properties.
“(The image being used) just implicates a lot of different things, and if people didn’t know better, or if they were hardcore, they could boycott them even though we had nothing to do with it,” Joe Spinello said.
Combs is especially concerned that the photo used in the ad shows children who attend a church camp at Tall Oaks. Last month, an ad supporting Marshall used a photo of him holding a naked infant.
“This is not the first time (Marshall has) used children inappropriately in his political ads, and won't be the last time he fails to protect the children of Kansas,” Hamilton’s campaign manager Tyson Brody said in a statement. “Marshall lies and uses children as political pawns to distract from the fact he had pregnant mothers arrested and jailed over small medical debts, and voted to protect the predators named in the Epstein files.”
Marshall originallysaid the documents detailing financier Jeffrey Epstein’s years of abuse were “not his focus,” but then later helped pass the bill to compel the release of the files.
A New York Times investigation released in September revealed Marshall sued more than 700 patients over medical debt to his OB-GYN practice.
The original ad featured an image of Camp Winnebago in Maine, but the new version scrubbed that one, too. Camp Winnebago did not respond to The Kansas News Service's request for comment by the time of publication.
Grace Hills reports on politics for the Kansas News Service.
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