Taylor Snider says she was paid for roughly a half-hour of sex work by a man she believes was Senator Lindsey Graham at a Washington, D.C. hotel in June 2015, just days after he launched his first presidential campaign. She's now the second trans woman to make such a claim since Graham's death last month, and she says she's coming forward to expose what she calls his hypocrisy on LGBTQ+ issues.
A Half-Hour at the DuPont Circle Hilton
Snider, a sex worker for nearly seven years by 2015, tells Them and The Advocate she thought little of the encounter at the time. She says she posted an ad online announcing she'd be in Washington, exchanged texts to arrange a meeting, and welcomed a client to her hotel room near DuPont Circle for about thirty minutes. It was, she says, an unremarkable transaction, until she saw the man's face on a restaurant television a week later during a cable news segment about the Tea Party, and recognized him as Graham.
Them reviewed screenshots of a text exchange from June 7, 2015, appearing to arrange the appointment, along with a dated ad Snider says she posted, but the outlet says it cannot independently confirm their authenticity. Graham's campaign trail whereabouts that week, drawn from press appearances and interviews, don't rule out the timeline Snider describes, though several of his former aides did not respond to requests for comment.
Snider notably says the encounter happened after she had already transitioned, distinguishing her account from that of Jesse James Rose, who says Graham hired her for sex before her transition, while she was in college. After going public, Snider says she faced pushback from some gay men who doubted her because Graham was rumored to prefer men. Her response was blunt:
Sources: them., The Advocate
Cover photo: Jan van der Wolf / Pexels
