RNC Mailer Includes Phone Sex Number

The bad press keeps coming for the Republican National Committee.

Fresh on the heels of a scandal over a nearly $2,000 charge to the RNC at a bondage-themed nightclub comes word that a fundraising mailer the organization sent out included a phone number leading those who called to a phone-sex line offering "live, one-on-one talk with a nasty girl who will do anything you want for just $2.99 per minute."

Politico has the story. The phone number included on the mailer is a 1-800 number that points callers to a different number offering a chance to chat with "real local students, housewives and working girls from all over the country." (You can listen to the call here; for mature ears only.)

The RNC said the situation arose because the vendor who made the mailer mistakenly used the 1-800 prefix instead of the correct 202 prefix. It did not tell Politico how many copies of the mailer were sent out.

While the phone sex number is the aspect of the mailer that will garner most of the attention, it was an isolated mistake; more pernicious in the eyes of many critics is the mailer itself, which was designed to resemble a census form.

The phone sex line was only discovered, in fact, because one of the people who received the mailer called the number to complain to the RNC about the fact that its fundraising solicitation looked like a government document.