Virginia House candidate Leslie Cockburn (D) on Sunday called out her GOP opponent for being what she called a “devotee of Bigfoot erotica.”
Cockburn tweeted two screenshots of illustrations posted to Denver Riggleman’s private Instagram page, both of which depict a nude Sasquatch with its genitals censored.
“My opponent Denver Riggleman, running mate of Corey Stewart, was caught on camera campaigning with a white supremacist,” Cockburn wrote in one tweet. “Now he has been exposed as a devotee of Bigfoot erotica. This is not what we need on Capitol Hill.”
Riggleman, a former Air Force officer and craft distillery owner, was selected last month as the GOP nominee to replace retiring Rep. Tom Garrett (R) in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District.
{mosads}Cockburn also referred to Riggleman as a “running mate” of Corey Stewart, the Republican nominee in a Virginia Senate race. Stewart was reported to have endorsed Paul Nehlen, a Wisconsin GOP congressional candidate who espoused white nationalist and anti-Semitic views.
One of Riggleman’s Bigfoot posts purportedly includes a caption that describes the image as “cover art” for a book on the “mating habits” of Bigfoot.
“I hide nothing in this magnificent tome,” he writes in the caption. “Don’t erase the censor box.”
“My ‘buddies’ thought this pic was fitting for my birthday next week and to celebrate my new book release in a month or 2,” he wrote in the other caption. “‘Mating Habits of Bigfoot and Why Women Want Him.’”
Riggleman told The Daily Progress in Charlottesville that the images were a joke from his military friends and described Cockburn’s tweets as “absurd.”
Riggleman did co-author at least one book about the creature, “Bigfoot Exterminators Inc. The Partially Cautionary, Mostly True Tale of Monster Hunt 2006,” but a source told the newspaper that it is “assuredly not” erotica.