Alani Bankhead’s campaign is pretty simple: Seth Bodnar and Kurt Alme are men, and men are bad.
One candidate, the campaign claims, implied a woman was fat and failed to protect a female student on Missoula’s campus, while the other candidate is soft on sex offenders. Let’s take a look at the evil men who Alani Bankhead is pretending she can beat by running a sexist campaign against them.
One thing I’ve learned about Democrats running political campaigns is how much they love dragging their children into the fray. That’s exactly what Bill Foley did this month by using his daughter’s experience in Missoula to suggest Seth Bodnar’s administration failed to keep his daughter safe from her roommate.
It should be noted that Bill Foley ran a failed campaign to become Mayor of Butte before entering the world of content creation, where he made claims against Bodnar that go something like this:
Perhaps my best decision as a father was to take my daughter to Rocky Mountain Martial Arts when she was in the second grade.
There, Delaney got to study under the late, great Master Jim Miller. He taught his students to never be a bully. He also taught them to never put up with a bully.
Master Miller taught his students self-defense, but more importantly, he instilled in them a sense of self-worth. He taught them to stand up for themselves and for others.
He taught them to never be the kind of people who look the other way when the going gets tough.
My daughter clearly took Master Miller’s teachings to heart. She has a keen sense of social justice, and she has never shied away from standing up for herself or for others.
When she was in eighth grade, Delaney punched out a boy who thought he could get away with calling her horrific names every day in class.
During her second year at the University of Montana, she punched a bully who had been threatening her and her roommates for several months. When the university would not protect her, she protected herself.
And Seth Bodnar punished her for that.
While Bill assumed that teaching his daughter to use violence as a way to solve her problems was the right thing to do, perhaps he should have considered first explaining to his daughter that the political party they are BOTH supporting cannot see women as being aggressive perpetrators of crimes, so maybe THAT is why a new roommate who aggressively masturbates in public while engaging in other disturbing behavior wasn’t treated as a potentially dangerous person committing crimes.
In January of 2024, my daughter and two roommates got a new roommate at their apartment in the dormitory Pantzer Hall. From the start, her words and actions were troubling, to say the least.
She treated the women like they were her property. If they went to a basketball game without her, she would threaten them like she was a jealous husband.
Immediately, she made threats of violence against these young women. Some were not-so-veiled threats. Others were not veiled at all. She made it known to them that she was possessed by a demon and was very capable of killing them.
…
By the time April rolled around, this roommate was known widely by UM students as the “Pantzer Hall Masturbator.” That is because she set up in one of the study lounges and masturbated so everyone walking by could clearly see her and what she was doing.
When my daughter and some of the other young women who were exposed to this scene went to the University of Montana campus police, they were quickly dismissed. Officer Mark Horner yelled at them for wasting his time, telling them it was not a crime.
I’m confused, isn’t this what progressive Democrats WANT a woke administration to do with a female student like this?
Sure, if it was a young MAN masturbating in public, it would obviously be easier to identify said masturbation as a criminal act–since men are inherently violent, abusive creatures who must be destroyed for the crime of making a woman feel even the slightest bit of discomfort–but when a WOMAN is the one doing it, well, maybe it’s just the result of patriarchal repression manifesting in a pathology of not wanting, but needing to be seen flicking her bean and moaning like a bitch in heat?
Before we get to the part of the story where Delaney Foley assaults the compulsive masturbator, let’s check the temperature of the broader political dynamics informing this young women’s entry into the “real” world of mean-ass politics:
Losing friends is one thing, but losing your FREEDOM because you think violence is the answer is quite another. For Bill Foley, I suggest that instead of inquiring about losing friends, he should be helping his daughter more maturely deal with the kind of mentally ill women we ALL have to artfully deal with in the real world.
That April 11, my daughter was on her way to class when the roommate quickly approached her in an angry-and-aggressive manor. When she lunged at my daughter, Delaney hit her with a one-two punch. It might have been a one-two-three combination.
The roommate cried and ran away, and my daughter immediately reported the incident to her resident assistant. It was a clear case of self-defense, and the aggressor was not seriously injured. Delaney only punched enough to defuse her assailant.
After temporarily punching away her problem, Delaney Foley did the most threatening thing a person can do in a town like this, and that’s threaten (with Daddy’s help) to turn her private conflict into a public MEDIA SHIT-STORM by going to the University newspaper.
This came as I was reaching out for even more help for my daughter and the other young women. The school still made it clear to us that it was not going to anything about the repeated threats and sexual exposer.
So, my daughter and I indicated that she might talk to the school newspaper about the experiences her, her roommates and other women of the dorm experienced that semester. We suggested that, perhaps, the school did not learn its lesson from Jon Krakauer’s book “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town” that followed the weak response to cases involving sexual assault by the University of Montana and the justice system.
That finally got the attention of the Bodnar administration, and suddenly my daughter faced disciplinary action for defending herself from the attack. Instead of helping her, they figured they would intimidate her into silence.
Bill Foley’s entitled daughter might want to step back from politics in order to appreciate that she didn’t get arrested and charged with assault when she used violence to allegedly defend herself because, if she had been arrested for punching a crazy woman, I would feel as bad for her as I feel for Scott Wiener.
Ok, let’s move on to the Bankhead campaign’s attack on Kurt Alme for being soft on sex offenders.
Alme oversaw the case of Mychal Thomas Damon, who was indicted in June 2019 by a grand jury on one count of abusive sexual contact with an individual under 12, which carries a maximum punishment of a lifetime in prison, a $250,000 fine and no less than five years to a lifetime of supervised release. The average sentence for this crime is less severe, but still significant: 62 months in prison, no fine and 143 months of supervised release, based on an analysis of 2025 data provided by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
Damon, 28, had admitted he touched the 6-year-old’s genitals. But in February 2020, Alme’s office filed a plea deal in his case that reduced his charge to felony child abuse.
The changes in the plea deal raised the alleged age of the victim from below 12 to below 14, stripped out the language of sexual intent and moved the offense out of the federal sex crime framework, meaning Damon would no longer be required to register as a sex offender. It jointly recommended Damon be sentenced to the time he’d already served of 324 days, and required only a sex offender evaluation. Alme’s name appears on the bottom of the document, along with a signature by his assistant U.S. attorney, Cassady Adams.
Let’s strategically ignore the name “Cassady Adams” because SHE isn’t running for office. Let’s also strategically ignore the fact that the ONLY reason anyone is pretending to care about this young victim of sexual abuse right now is because of the political campaigns being run.
If the Huffington Post, or Alani Bankhead, truly cared about victims of sexual abuse, they wouldn’t be using graphic details–like how the abuser digitally penetrated a young girl’s vagina–to score political points.
In June, Alme filed a sentencing memorandum that described Damon’s conduct, which included details of him touching the child’s vagina with skin-to-skin contact, and the adverse effect it had on her mental health. Local reporting at the time said the victim had told a therapist “Mychal touched me” and hurt her by putting his fingers in her “hoo hoo.”
Ten days later, Alme announced Damon was being sentenced to time served of 324 days and two years of supervised release. As of June 2026, Damon is not listed in the national sex offender registry or in Montana’s Sexual or Violent Offender Registry.
To contrast this case with the sex offender I’ve been tracking for years, here’s a local article that references Todd Spence’s incest conviction when he was arrested for meth in 2023:
According to court documents, Spence has two prior felony convictions including incest with a history of revocations, and a felony theft along with a partner family member assault conviction and numerous other misdemeanors.
Spence has a currently pending charge of threats or improper influence in official matters, two pending trespass charges in Missoula County Justice Court, two charges for disorderly conduct, two charges for obstructing, and intoxicated pedestrian pending in Missoula Municipal Court.
If anyone NOT running a political campaign can explain to me why the Missoula Criminal Justice System has been going easy on this piece of shit for YEARS, reach out to me and let me know.
In a sane world, those who harm children, or compulsively masturbate in public, would be dealt with in a non-partisan manner that addresses underlying social factors with the ultimate goal of keeping the public safe, but this is FAR from being a sane world. Using details of an abused 6 year old’s “hoo-hoo” is just the most recent example of how disgusting modern politics has become.
If you appreciate a truly non-partisan, journalistic take on this Big Sky dumpster fire, please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. Any little bit helps as I continue to defend myself against the lawfare effort (using public resources) to shut me up.
Thanks for reading!
To clarify – you’re disgusted that a newspaper referenced local reporting that quoted a six year-old child who as a victim of sexual abuse… but you’re entirely unbothered that Alme changed the actual age of the victim, let the perpretator go early, and didn’t require him to register as a sex offender? Please explain why you think Alme made the right decision here.
I’m disgusted at politics, Jason. I wouldn’t vote for any of these candidates.
Well, Travis, you accused Alani Bankhead of not caring about the victims of child sexual abuse. Alani has dedicated much of her career to finding and arresting the perpetrators of these crimes, so I think your accusation lacks any logic or merit. If you’re running interference for a politician like Alme who helped this sex predator roam free, it sounds like you’re the one who doesn’t care.
You clearly don’t understand what the Epstein network is and who is still getting protected by it.
I’m sorry, my friend, but this is yellow journalism, plain and simple.
How Alme agreed to deal with a man who with his fingers penetrated the vagina of a young child victim in one jurisdiction, has nothing to do with how another jurisdiction deals with a different man accused of misdemeanors in Justice Court that were perpetrated upon different victims, and who has a prior felony conviction for incest. The sentence the latter defendant received for the prior incest offense may be one that you (or I, or anyone) deems inappropriately lenient, but how that amounts to some overall, interconnected ethereal injustice related to these disparite episodes, is incomprehensible.
Teaching girls how to defend themselves is hardly sexist. There isn’t a massive outbreak of women raping, beating, and killing men. Females are just as entitled to use physical force to repel and defend against an attack by other females, as they are to use physical force against male attackers. Montana, like most Western states, is a “no duty to retreat, stand your ground” state. One is not legally required in this state to try to outrun an attacker, or to wait until hit, kicked, tackled, stabbed, or shot, before defending one’s self from an assault reasonably perceived to be imminent under the totality of circumstances.
Punching out a person for merely using words to harass, doesn’t qualify as privileged self defense, unless the verbal aggression amounts to “fighting words.”
Agreed, that it is far, far better to defuse and de-escalate conflict by non-violent means. In the context of grade school/middle school society, however, the effects of extreme bullying are often worse than would result from being given a bloody nose, and can do lifelong psychological damage. Whether or not deemed justifiable by the law or armchair arbiters, there are many times when giving the primary instigators a licking is perfectly understandable, albeit not acceptable as a policy. And that often stops the bullying.
And now, turning to how all of the disconnected, unrelated episodes mentioned amount to Democratic Party sexism, is mystifying.
Additionally, offhand, I can’t recall any specific incidents of Democratic Party candidates assaulting journalists or political opponents (there are undoubtedly some examples of that), but that’s not so with regard to Republicans (for example, Gianforte). But such isolated incidents, regardless of any party affiliation, do not a partisan tactic make. An obvious exception, is the hyper-partisan attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol, at the instigation of MAGA Republican Trump, in which Capitol Police were variously assaulted, maimed, and fatally injured, as the attackers chanted “Hang [Vice President] Pence!”
As for Bankhead, she is simply exploiting what is historical fact about UM administration treatment of women’s complaints of sexual misconduct.
Finally, to assert that Democratic Party candidates are uniquely apt to “drag their children” into their campaigns is preposterous. That is obvious and requires no presentation of evidence. Most candidates do that, regardless of their party affiliation, if any. There is a great deal of generalizing from single incidents, as well as blatant bias, in such a strange claim.
Perhaps I’m missing something. The contentions of this piece come across as journalistic word salad.
Nothing personal!
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