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Kelly Rissman
US News Reporter
Stephen Colbert took aim at Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, over his alleged porn habit on Wednesday’s edition of The Late Show.
Earlier this week, it was reported that Robinson, who is running on an Evangelical Christian platform, frequented his local porn shop as often as five times a week during the 1990s and early 2000s.
“A North Carolina news site is reporting that Robinson went to a porn shop nearly every day of the week in the Nineties and early 2000s,” Colbert said during his opening monology. “Well, of course you got to go every day, otherwise you’re not getting the freshest porn. It’s not like they refrigerate the stuff.”
The talk show host was amazed by Robinson’s supposed consistency, saying: “He went almost every day for over a decade. I don’t do anything almost every day for a decade. Mark Robinson went to the porn store more regularly than I floss.”
“Robinson wasn’t just window-shopping,” Colbert added. “The same report says that over the years, Robinson bought hundreds of bootleg porn videos… I’m talking Armageddon Laid Tonight, Pulp Friction, and, of course, Sex Toy Story. Surprisingly, the theme song is also ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me.’”
Robinson, who is North Carolina’s first African American lieutenant governor, has a controversial history of comparing abortion to slavery, quoting Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and referring to LGBT+ people as “filth.” He’s also claimed that Marvel’s 2018 film Black Panther was made by “an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic Marxists.”
He was elected into office in 2020, two years after his speech supporting gun rights in the wake of the Parkland school shooting in Florida went viral.
On Tuesday, North Carolina investigative website The Assembly published an interview with a former employee of a 24-hour porn video shop in Greensboro who said Robinson would come in “every night that I worked, which would have been five nights a week.”
“He was spending a good amount of money,” the shop worker, Louis Money, said. Five other customers and employees also reportedly confirmed Robinson’s frequent presence.
Robinson campaign spokesperson Mike Lonergan told The Assembly in an email that Money’s claims were “bulls***” and a “complete and total fiction.”
“This false and personal attack on my boss is complete fiction,” Lonergan wrote.
