Free The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin by Joe McGinniss Page B

Stein and Stambaugh acting inappropriately during an early-morning step-aerobics class that she occasionally attended. The two men, being less than svelte, had signed up for the class, along with the head of the department of public works, Jack Felton.
    “It was a small room,” Stambaugh said, “and there were maybe twenty people in the class. Us big guys stood in the back so nobody would have to look at us, because, to tell you the truth, it wasn’t a pretty sight. One day Sarah shows up. She goes right to the front and she puts on this incredible demonstration—three risers, double steps, I don’t know what all, but it was a hell of a routine. Afterward, I complimented her on her incredible stamina.”
    Before the next class, the instructor approached the three men. “Sarah Palin says she’s uncomfortable,” the instructor said, “because she thinks you guys are ogling her butt. She wants me to move you to the front of the room so you won’t be able to watch her during class.”
    The men agreed. But that didn’t work either. “You guys are so big,” the instructor said, “that when you’re in the front of the room you block everybody’s view of me.”
    And that was that. Neither the mayor nor the police chief nor the superintendent of the department of public works wanted to make Sarah or any other woman in Wasilla uncomfortable in exercise class. So they stopped going. Too late: Sarah’s supporters had something else to whisper about.
    A friend offered a different perspective. “One morning,” she told me during the summer of 2010, “Sarah came back in her workout stuff—her outfits were very provocative—and she’s singing, ‘I like big butts and I cannot lie,’ and she’s dancing around the kitchen. Todd comes in from the garage, and Sarah starts going on about how the guys are checking her out at the workout place. The way she’s saying it is totally antagonizing Todd, and he finally says, ‘Well, why don’t you put some fuckin’ clothes on?’ ”
    AT ONE POINT in the campaign, Sarah claimed her tires had been slashed and implied that Stein supporters had done it.
    “If it happened, which I doubt,” Stein says, “it was probably related to the domestic turmoil she was going through at the time. We were hearing a lot of scuttlebutt, and Todd was certainly notable by his absence. He and Brad Hanson broke up their snow machine business in Big Lake and we were hearing that was because Sarah was having an affair with Brad. She was apparently telling people, ‘I’m not sure Todd’s my man.’ And I do remember that her wedding ring was coming off and on a lot.”
    Sarah’s affair with Hanson, which was revealed nationally by the
National Enquirer
during the 2008 campaign, was apparently common knowledge in Wasilla. Hanson was a property developer and businessman whose parents were friends of Chuck and Sally Heath’s. He would go on to become a Palmer city councilman and coach of the Palmer High School hockey team.
    “It was known,” a friend of Todd’s told me in 2010. “For example, Todd knew that I knew. He was embarrassed. It wasn’t something he talked about a lot.”
    Both Sarah and Hanson have denied that they ever had an affair. People who claim to be aware of the affair—six months is a common estimate of its duration—believed that Sarah was using Hanson to show Todd that two could play the game she suspected he’d been playing for years in Dillingham.
    “Todd was basically spanked and put back in his box,” a friend of his says. “The marriage was never right before and it was never right after.”
    IT WAS NOT in Stein’s nature to fight dirty. “I didn’t want any part of any of that,” he told me. “In fact, when I heard that Sarah was afraid I’d get nasty, I actually called her and went to her house to assure her that if any information about her personal life came my way I would not use it in the campaign. That didn’t stop her, of course, but I stuck to