The US Senate campaign of Montana Republican Tim Sheehy has been forced on to the defensive following the publication of misogynistic and racist social media posts he is alleged to have written.
Sheehy is one of his party’s leading hopes to help it take control of the Senate in next year’s elections, and he is running for the Republican nomination to challenge Jon Tester, seen as one of the most vulnerable Democrats seeking re-election.
The surfacing of the old Facebook posts threatens to damage the reputation of the former US Navy Seal, an ally of Donald Trump who describes himself on a campaign fundraising website as a “businessman, a husband, a father, and a humble servant of God”.
The revelations and screenshots of the posts were published on Tuesday night by Insider, which said Sheehy’s old Facebook profile – since taken down – was “full of questionable photos”, including “lewd photos of women, a caricature of Middle Eastern people, and homoerotic jokes”.
One post features a photo allegedly uploaded by Sheehy of a friend drinking from a bottle lodged between a woman’s breasts, and a comment from him which reads in part: “I don’t think her boobs are that big.”
In another, Sheehy appears dressed in a white robe and keffiyeh, alongside friends dressed as Iraq’s former president Saddam Hussein, who was executed in 2006 for crimes against humanity.
A third features a woman identified as Sheehy’s now-wife Carmen in a stars-and-stripes bikini, firing what appears to be an automatic weapon. “She’s not a skank … she’s a very fit defender of Americas [sic] freedom obviously,” he wrote in an accompanying comment.
The posts, the outlet said, were made between 2006 and 2008, when Sheehy was a student at separate army and navy military training academies, and were “much of what one might expect from an adolescent posting on a burgeoning social media network in the 2000s”.
The Guardian has reached out to Sheehy’s campaign for comment.
In a statement to Insider, Sheehy spokesperson Katie Martin did not deny he had made the posts but called the story “harassment of a war hero over some goofing around as a kid”.
Sheehy, who founded his own aerospace company when he became “medically separated” from the military after being wounded during a tour of duty in Afghanistan, was twice decorated for “valor in combat”.
Martin also blamed “Democrats” for circulating the screenshots and accused them of hypocrisy over an episode reported last month by Fox News in which Tester is alleged to have urinated in a field in front of a journalist.
“Neither he nor his staff have yet to explain why a grown man at 66 years old would find that behavior appropriate,” Martin told the Insider.
Sheehy launched his campaign last month and faces a “competitive primary” for his party’s Senate nomination, according to the Montana Free Press.
Among his likely opponents, Politico said, is conservative state lawmaker Matt Rosendale, a “rabble rouser” who lost to Tester in 2018 by almost 4% in a state Trump won handily in the 2016 and 2020 presidential races.
Democrats have accused Sheehy, a millionaire businessman with roots in Minnesota, as an “out of state transplant” recruited by Republican leadership specifically to challenge Tester.
“Jon Tester has farm equipment that’s been in Montana longer than Tim Sheehy,” Monica Robinson, a spokesperson for the state Democratic party, told the Free Press.
