Robinson Reemerges, Admits To Porn Habit and Lying About Allegations

Former Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson admitted in a 93-minute video posted online Thursday that he was “obsessed” with sex and pornography, but said he didn’t regret lying to the public about it in the closing weeks of his 2024 gubernatorial campaign.

“I watched pornography and was involved with people that watched pornography and that was absolutely true,” Robinson told Real Truth News, a conservative “news” venture his former campaign manager, Matt Hurley, established earlier this year. (Hurley, who is based in Florida, has been accused of questionable business activities.)

Robinson said “there’s some truth” to reporting on his relationship to pornography, but didn’t directly address all of the allegations raised in CNN’s story about comments on online pornography forums.  

Several weeks before the CNN report, The Assembly reported on allegations that he frequented Greensboro’s video porn stores in the 1990s and early 2000s. Robinson and his campaign forcefully denied all allegations at the time, saying the claims of porn store visits were “bullshit” and a “complete and total fiction” and calling Assembly reporters “degenerates” for raising them. Robinson also dismissed the CNN story as “not the words of Mark Robinson.”

In the conversation that aired Thursday, Robinson said he is “deeply flawed” but not “a monster.” “I gave enough molehills for them to make mountains out of. That’s the thing I’m most disappointed about,” he said.

Asked why he lied during the campaign, Robinson said disputing the stories was necessary to help President Donald Trump carry North Carolina. (Trump won the state, while Robinson suffered the biggest gubernatorial defeat in the state since 1980.)

“I won’t say that I completely lied. Some of the things about the whole story, some of it there’s some truth to it,” he said. “The most expedient thing to do for the people around me was to continue to fight. And if I had to ignore the truth at that moment for their expediency, I felt like it was the right thing to do.”

He added, “I’d make the exact same decision. I’d fight the exact same way.”

The only regret Robinson cited was keeping in place a campaign team that battled internally over the lengths it should go to reign in the lieutenant governor. 

“I should have changed campaign teams in the summer and took my campaign in a completely different direction,” Robinson said in the conversation. “And if I had, I believe even with the CNN scandal, I still would’ve won the race.”

Long before the pornography scandal, Robinson trailed now-Gov. Josh Stein in public opinion polls. 

His conversation on Thursday represented less of a personal change or growth story and more of a familiar history of defending himself at all costs. 

He had previously discussed his traumatic childhood, highlighted by a violent father. He struggled to find his way throughout adult life, having a short-lived military career, paying for an abortion for his then-girlfriend and now wife, undergoing multiple bankruptcies, blaming his wife for unpaid car taxes, saying he didn’t know whether he filed his taxes jointly or separately, and a history of controversial social media posts (he has continued to make racist quips on social media about Black people). 

Neither Robinson nor Hurley responded to requests for additional comment.