Bombshell accusations of Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) allegedly physically abusing her ex-husband surfaced on Wednesday, which come on the heels of her pattern of aggressive interpersonal interactions in recent years.
Porter was the first of three prominent House Democrats to announce their candidacies for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) seat as she heads to retirement at the culmination of her term. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), both of whom have held House seats for at least two decades, have also launched bids in the high-stakes race.
Now, just months after her campaign’s launch, documents regarding her divorce from ex-husband Matthew Hoffman found their way to the Daily Mail.
Hoffman’s jaw-dropping accusations include accounts of Porter allegedly causing physical harm to her arms with scratch marks so she could blame it on him, allegedly assaulting him with scalding hot food in a whirlwind of rage, and allegedly breaking a glass coffee pot while having a meltdown, which injured him.
The Daily Mail’s Morgan Phillips did not provide the dates surrounding the self-harm allegations. However, she reported that an alleged incident – in which Hoffman claims Porter dumped a piping hot bowl of mashed potatoes on his head – occurred in 2006.
Hoffman asserted that while he was preparing the side dish, Porter entered the kitchen and shouted, “Can’t you read the f***ing instructions!” in front of their son after catching a glimpse of the potatoes, per Phillips.
“She then took the ceramic bowl of steaming hot potatoes and dumped it on my head, burning my scalp,” Hoffman said in the document.
The alleged coffee pot incident supposedly occurred in 2012, after the couple sought out anger management courses several years earlier, per Phillips.
Hoffman – a then-stay-at-home father – contended that Porter was infuriated their home was not tidy after she returned from work. He alleged she broke a glass coffee pot by banging it against the counter, causing him a wound. Their children were home during the alleged ordeal as she called him “incompetent” and “a f***cking slob,” Hoffman said.
Accompanying the alleged physical abuse, Hoffman said that Porter regularly hurled verbal attacks, the nature of which demeaned his intelligence. He also accused her of being shrill and short-tempered with their children, Phillips noted.
In 2018, when Porter was first running for Congress, she sat down with the Huffington Post to discuss her divorce as “[s]everal delegates to the Orange County Democratic Party Convention told Porter they’d heard rumors from a rival campaign that something in her divorce records might disqualify her in the general election,” the outlet noted.
Porter claimed at the time that Hoffman turned abusive after they separated and were still living together in 2013 while he tried to stop the divorce from proceeding.
She alleged that Hoffman punched a wall, physically pushed her, “shoved their 1-year-old daughter across the kitchen in her high chair, threatened to kill himself and once held the door of Porter’s car open to stop her from driving to a school meeting,” the Huffington Posts’s Lura Basset wrote.
According to the Mail, Porter said in court documents that Hoffman only turned violent after the separation, aside from one incident years ago.
“Porter said in divorce documents that their marriage had been ‘troubled’ for four years, leading to divorce, but her husband had ‘not acted violently’ other than one incident years earlier where Hoffman punched a wall until she began the process of leaving him,” Phillips wrote.
Details of Hoffman’s allegations come as Porter has drawn scrutiny in recent months over her interactions with a former staffer and an elected Democrat official in California.
Just months ago, she caught criticism “for allegedly punishing one of her Wounded Warrior Fellows after she accused the staffer of giving her coronavirus,” as Breitbart News’s Jordan Dixon-Hamilton reported:
Sasha Georgiades is a U.S. Navy veteran who joined Porter’s office as a Wounded Warrior Fellow in the fall of 2020. Although Georgiades’s fellowship was set to end in August 2022, she said her fellowship was cut a few weeks short after she failed to follow “office protocols” on coronavirus.
In a text to Georgiades, Porter asked why she failed to adhere to protocol, adding, “It’s really disappointing.”
The protocol she violated was “failing to take a COVID-19 test the instant she felt even slightly unwell,” Reason reported, citing Georgiades. Initially, she attributed soreness to her frequent workouts and tested only after starting to feel sick.
In response to Porter, she texted that she accepted responsibility and apologized, adding, “Just because I felt okay in the moment doesn’t mean I was.”
The next morning Porter mandated that she work remotely for the last weeks of her fellowship and steer clear of the office “given [her] failure to follow office policies.”
“Essentially, I was demoted to remote and banned from the office,” Georgiades told Fox News.
In another text, she thanked Porter for the opportunity to work in her office and noted that her “head was not in the best place” following the murder of a friend in the Navy, which she said could explain the protocol oversight.
“Well you gave me Covid,” Porter responded. “In 25 months, it took you not following the rules to get me sick. My children have nobody to care for them.”
Georiades told Fox News she thinks Porter would have outright terminated her had she not been protected by the Wounded Warrior program.
Porter also garnered scrutiny last December over a heated text exchange with Democrat Irvine, California, Mayor Farra Khan in July 2021. Porter seemingly took issue with Khan arriving at the same Mexican restaurant she was attending and told the mayor, “You have a reputation for not staying in your lane and seeking attention.”
In another text, after Khan suggested it would be “more professional” for Porter to call her. The congresswoman invoked her title as a U.S. representative and challenged the mayor for critiquing her “professionalism.”
“I am a United States Congresswoman. You can lecture me on professionalism. And see what happens,” Porter wrote.
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