A Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina has insisted he will not exit the race after it was reported that he made controversial comments on a porn website more than a decade ago.
Mark Robinson characterised the CNN report, which alleged that he had referred to himself as a “black Nazi” on an adult forum, as “salacious tabloid lies”.
He has been under pressure from state Republicans and members of Donald Trump’s campaign team to quit the race in the swing state, according to anonymous sources quoted by the Carolina Journal newspaper.
Trump himself did not refer to the report during his comments at a Thursday night event in Washington about antisemitism.
Robinson, 56, is a former furniture manufacturer who was elected to be the state’s first black lieutenant governor in 2020.
He won the nomination to run for governor in March after receiving an endorsement from Trump, who called him “Martin Luther King on steroids”.
Robinson’s race is in a potentially pivotal swing state which Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is hoping to wrest from the Republicans.
According to the CNN report published on Thursday, Robinson used to visit a porn website from 2008-12 called Nude Africa, with the username “minisoldr”.
According to CNN, minisoldr posted about enjoying watching “tranny” porn, adding: “Yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”
The BBC has not verified the CNN report.
In 2021, Robinson refused to apologise after he was criticised for saying that children in schools should not be learning about “transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth”.
In a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday, as the CNN story was being published, he denied wrongdoing.
“Let me reassure you, the things you will see in that story, those are not the words of Mark Robinson,” he said.
“We are staying in this race. We are in it to win it.”
He said he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching” by his white Democratic opponent, Josh Stein.
Stein’s campaign said in a statement that “North Carolinians already know Mark Robinson is completely unfit to be governor”.
Opinion polls already suggest Stein, a Harvard-educated lawyer who is currently North Carolina’s attorney general, has a firm lead in the race.
The North Carolina Republican Party defended Robinson in a statement, saying “the Left” was “trying to demonise him via personal attacks”.
Trump himself did not address the controversy during Thursday night’s comments to the Israeli-American Council National Summit, in which he vowed to “stop the toxic poison of antisemitism from spreading all over America and all over the world”.
He bemoaned the lack of support he said he was receiving from Jewish voters, saying if he failed to win the election, “the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that”.
The Harris campaign posted a video on social media reminding voters of Trump’s past praise for Robinson.
The deadline for withdrawing from the governor contest was on Thursday evening, as postal ballots go into the mail on Friday. Early voting in the state begins in less than a month.
Recent polling in North Carolina shows Harris and Trump effectively tied among likely voters.
The Tar Heel State has been a Republican stronghold, with only one Democratic presidential nominee winning there in the last 20-plus years.
Trump narrowly beat Joe Biden in North Carolina four years ago by less than 2%.
Democrats have campaigned heavily in the state this election season.