Rep. Katie Porter scalded ex-husband’s scalp with potatoes: documents

The former husband of Rep. Katie Porter said the California Democrat frequently abused him verbally and threw “toys, books and other objects” at him during their marriage — even pouring scalding-hot mashed potatoes on his head during a fight, according to divorce records.

Matthew Hoffman, who filed for divorce from Porter in 2013, said in a request for a restraining order dated April 30 of that year that he was “routinely” called a “f—ing idiot” and “f—ing incompetent” by his rage-prone spouse, who also shattered a glass coffee pot on their kitchen counter in March 2012 when she felt their house wasn’t clean enough.

“She would not let me have a cell phone because she said, ‘You’re too f—ing dumb to operate it,’” Hoffman said of Porter, 49, who has also been accused of ridiculing former members of her staff.

“When she gets angry, she will claw and scratch her arms and then say to me ‘Look what you made me do!’” Hoffman also said in the records, first obtained by DailyMail.com. “She regularly says that I am a bad parent in front of the kids … Recently the children began spitting at me and throwing their food at me, calling me ‘bad daddy.’”

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In 2006, Hoffman said, Porter took issue with how Hoffman was preparing mashed potatoes for dinner, asking him: “Can’t you read the f—ing instructions!” Then, her ex-husband said, Porter raised a “ceramic bowl of steaming hot potatoes and dumped it on my head, burning my scalp.”

In response to Hoffman’s allegations, Porter, then a professor of bankruptcy law at the University of California, Irvine, in Orange County, claimed in her own request for a restraining order that her ex ordered her out of the house on April 24, 2013, and called her a “dumb bitch,” a “despicable person” and “f—ing evil” before adding that she should “rot in hell.”

According to Porter, Hoffman then raged at the couple’s son Luke, telling the child: “You have taken a bad situation and made it a thousand times worse.” Hoffman also allegedly punched a bathroom light switch until it shattered and threw a newspaper at her.

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In her first congressional campaign, Porter referred to herself as a “victim of domestic violence” and her House biography touts her as “a single mom of three school-aged kids.”

“I don’t have a shady background,” she told HuffPost in May 2018. “I’m the most boring person in America. I’m a mom of three kids, I protected my family, I ended a marriage that was troubled.”

The third-term congresswoman is running against two other House Democrats — Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) — to replace Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who announced in February she would not seek re-election.

Porter, a former Harvard law student and protégé of progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” this week to tout her new memoir, “I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan.”

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The Orange County lawmaker may be best known for using props such as a whiteboard in committee hearings when grilling congressional witnesses — and even dressed as Batgirl on the day the House first voted to impeach President Donald Trump in 2019.

During the prolonged vote series that determined the next speaker of the House this past January, Porter could be seen in the chamber reading the self-help book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.”

In December, a Navy veteran who worked for Porter accused the congresswoman of dismissing sexual harassment allegations made by another staffer and cracking off-color jokes about race.

Sasha Georgiades, who worked for the Democrat for two years as a Wounded Warrior fellow, also said Porter harshly criticized her aides and appeared to be motivated by a desire for “fame” and “power.”
Georgiades told Reason magazine that Porter demoted her at the end of the fellowship for allegedly exposing the congresswoman to COVID-19.