SNAKKLE RECAP
Now it seems all too familiar: a beautiful young woman caught with an older, married politician. But back in 1987, the image of Miami-based model Donna Rice sitting on the lap of front-running presidential candidate Gary Hart was, well, shocking.
Journalists at the time often followed an unwritten gentlemen’s code that kept private affairs private. But when Senator Hart dared reporters to follow him, The Miami Herald—already in pursuit of a tip about his sexual dalliances—felt emboldened to report the story. After surveilling the Colorado Democrat’s Washington, D.C., home, they broke the news that Rice stayed overnight.
The scandal and ensuing media furor tanked Hart’s campaign and left Rice devastated. “It became anything goes,” Rice tells Snakkle. “The media was this big Goliath, and I was this 29-year-old scared girl. . . . It was very painful. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I thought my life was over.”
OFFERS
No stranger to media attention, the former Miss South Carolina was deluged with offers: a reported $1 million for a spread in Playboy, a book deal, an ABC television movie. “The more silent I was, the more interested they became in me,” Rice tells Snakkle. She says one organization literally offered a blank check in return for spilling the details of her relationship with Hart, but she declined. Rice finally agreed to an interview with Barbara Walters, who asked point-blank if she had slept with Hart. Rice refused to answer.
IN EXILE
Rice had dreamed of making a difference in people’s lives through media, but capitalizing on political scandal was not how she wanted her dream to unfold. She returned to her Christian faith, believing “that God would unfold it for me.”
She spent the next seven years trying to stay under the radar, splitting her time between D.C. and L.A., where she auditioned for acting roles. She met Jack Hughes on a blind date in 1991, and though he wanted to marry, she refused, not able to envision any kind of professional life in Washington. “I could not move back there,” she says. “I was going to be a leper, with politics and Congress.”
She continued to date Hughes long-distance while she pursued her dream of becoming an actor. After she lost a role opposite Jim Carrey in The Mask to a then-unknown Cameron Diaz, “he finally said, ‘this long-distance thing isn’t going to work anymore, have a nice life,'” Rice recalls with a chuckle. It was then she decided to move back and be with the man she loved.
In 1994, Rice and Hughes married and she became a stepmother to his two children. She also landed a job that would change her life.
SNAKKLE UPDATE
Still wary of the media, Donna Rice Hughes was hesitant to take a job as communications director of Enough Is Enough, which was established to fight pornography and the sexual exploitation of children.
“God has a great sense of humor and will put you back on the horse that threw you,” Hughes tells Snakkle. “No one would have suggested I get involved in an issue that was sexually controversial.”
Less than a year on the job, Hughes was asked to speak before Congress in support of protecting children from Internet pornography, and she accepted. “The bottom line was for the pain to count for something bigger than me,” she says.
As The Washington Post Magazine reported: “At first, no one seemed to connect Hughes to the woman whose infamous photo on Hart’s lap had been plastered all over the news. But when the media blew her cover months later, she says, it didn’t matter. She had regained her confidence and credibility.”
Currently the president and chairman of Enough Is Enough, Hughes wrote the book Kids Online: Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace, and lawmakers now seek her out not for romance but for her expertise on Internet safety.
NEW DREAMS
Today, Hughes has a new goal. She wants “one million eyeballs” on her program Internet Safety 101, a pioneering, Congressionally funded, national public education campaign that creates awareness of how children can be exploited even “under the nose of a loving parent.”
November 26, 2018 at 11:48 pm, Sherry Innes said:
This is a beautiful example of what God can do when a prodigal prostrates herself before Him in true repentance. Beauty from ashes. Good for you, Donna Rice Hughes!