A Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina has insisted he will not drop out of the race after it was reported he made controversial comments on a porn website more than a decade ago.
Mark Robinson characterized the CNN report, which claimed he referred to himself as a “black Nazi” in an adult forum, as “salacious tabloid lies”.
He has been under pressure from state Republicans and members of Donald Trump’s campaign team to drop out of the race in the swing state, according to anonymous sources cited by the Carolina Journal newspaper.
Trump himself did not refer to the report during his comments at an event Thursday night in Washington on anti-Semitism.
Robinson, 56, is a former furniture maker who was elected to be the state’s first black lieutenant governor in 2020.
He won the nomination to run for governor in March after receiving an endorsement from Trump, who called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Robinson’s race is in a potentially pivotal swing state that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is hoping to wrest from Republicans.
According to the CNN report published Thursday, Robinson visited a porn website from 2008 to 2012 called Nude Africa, using the username “minisoldr”.
According to CNN, minisoldr posted about the pleasure of watching “tranny” porn, adding: “Yes, I’m a ‘perv’ too!”
The BBC has not verified the CNN report.
In 2021, Robinson refused to apologize after being criticized for saying that children in schools should not learn “transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that ugly stuff”.
In a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday, while the CNN story was being published, he denied wrongdoing.
“Let me assure you, the things you see in that story, they are not the words of Mark Robinson,” he said.
“We’re in this race. We’re in it to win.”
He said he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching” by his white Democratic opponent, Josh Stein.
Stein’s campaign said in a statement that “North Carolinians already know that Mark Robinson is completely unfit to be governor.”
Opinion polls already suggest that Stein, a Harvard-educated lawyer who is currently North Carolina’s attorney general, has a firm lead in the race.
The North Carolina Republican Party defended Robinson in a statement, saying “the left” was “trying to demonize him via personal attacks.”
Trump himself did not address the controversy during Thursday night’s remarks at the National Council of Israel-Americans, in which he vowed to “stop the toxic poison of anti-Semitism from spreading across America and the world “.
He bemoaned the lack of support he said he was getting from Jewish voters, saying that if he didn’t win the election, “the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with it.”
Harris’ campaign released a video on social media reminding voters of Trump’s past praise for Robinson.
The deadline to withdraw from the governor’s race was Thursday night, as postal ballots go in the mail on Friday. Early voting in the state begins in less than a month.
A recent poll in North Carolina shows that Harris and Trump are effectively tied among likely voters.
The Tar Heel State has been a Republican stronghold, with only one Democratic presidential candidate winning there in the last 20 years.
Trump narrowly beat Joe Biden in North Carolina four years ago by less than 2%.
Democrats have campaigned heavily in the state this election season.