Holocaust-Denying GOP Candidate Used to Be Porn Shop Regular Who Bought Everyone Pizza
Republican Mark Robinson is running for governor in North Carolina, but three decades ago, he was seemingly running for Porn Shop Customer of the Year: According to multiple people, in the 1990s, Robinson was a regular at a North Carolina 24/7 porn shop called Gents, where he would show up five nights a week to watch videos in a private booth. “Every night that I worked, which would have been five nights a week, I saw Mark,” one ex-employee, Louis Money, told North Carolina's The Assembly. “He was spending a good amount of money.”
Several customers recounted Robinson ordering pizza for fellow patrons and porn shop employees—and for himself, to eat in the booth with his, err, film. Many of the men who spoke with The Assembly seemed to have fond memories of their time with Robinson. One fellow customer said Robinson, who's since characterized Black Panther as a movie made by “an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic Marxists,” was a “regular dude" who "didn’t really seem hyper-political.” Money said Robinson was "hilarious": “He would have like five or six of us up front dying laughing at 4 in the morning. Almost like a standup routine—not copying Andrew Dice Clay, but almost like doing an Andrew Dice Clay comedy bit.” Similarly, another former customer called Robinson a "jokester" who would "bring pizza every once in a while, and he’d tell jokes and what have you, and then go look at videos.” Another former employee said Robinson tended to show up late and "would talk for 10, 15, 20 minutes about every time he came in there" before, of course, meandering off to take care of business. Another employee, who said Robinson came in "often," stressed that back then, “he was a cool dude" and "wasn’t an asshole like he is now.”
In August, Money posted a rap-rock music video titled, “The Lt. Governor Owes Me Money.” According to the song, Robinson bought “hundreds” of bootleg porn compilations from Money, but never paid him $25 for his last order. That music video seems to have sparked The Assembly's raw, rigorous probe into Robinson's, err, past.
Consuming porn itself isn't a red flag, nor should it disqualify someone from running for governor, but I will say that frequenting a porn shop at least five nights a week and occupying its private booth each night veers squarely into "weird" territory for me. That said, everything we know about Robinson—his fanatical obsession with equating abortion with "murder" against Black communities, his questioning of the Holocaust, his ardent defenses of sexual abusers—is awful and disqualifying. Learning that he was once a porn shop regular, beloved by both employees and fellow regulars, is just funny.
Robinson's campaign, however, does not seem to find it funny, and contested The Assembly's reporting—or, as New York magazine put it, Robinson "strenuously denies that as well as the Holocaust." OK!
The report notably cites Robinson's own words from his memoir, where he admits that, during this period of his life, he was “guilty of bad money management” and that “when I had money and should have been putting it in the bank or spending it on essential things … I was just throwing money away.” I would certainly classify renting a private booth in a porn store five times a week—and buying pizza for everyone in the store, no less!—as "bad money management." But as someone guilty of Doordashing Auntie Anne's soft pretzels now and then, who am I to judge, really???
Between House Speaker Mike Johnson publicly bragging about mutually monitoring porn habits with his teenage son, and Republicans' Project 2025 detailing steps to quite literally criminalize porn, the GOP has become increasingly weird about porn over the past few years. So, I'm almost inclined to say Robinson's thirsty little escapades could help his party against the surging, frankly unbeatable "weird" allegations—but, again: Five nights a week in a private booth is just a couple of nights too many, IMO!