It started with The Hook’s revelation that the recent Democratic candidate doesn’t own the local business that he claimed to own. A regular talking point of his campaign was his ownership of Snap Fitness, a claim that surprised the owners of Snap Fitness. Since Halfaday had reported an ownership interest in his candidacy filing with the State Board of Elections, that got voter registrar Sheri Iachetta’s attention. She turned over the matter to Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman, at the direction of a unanimous electoral board. In the meantime, The Hook’s Lisa Provence did a little more digging and found that Halfaday doesn’t even appear to live in the city, and that at least some of the 21 donors who he listed on campaign finance reports never gave him any money at all.
The piling-up of apparent mistruths make it logical to question just about everything that is known about him, as surely local media outlets are doing now. Like:
- Did he actually receive $10,000 in donations, or is everything beyond the campaign’s $2,700 in expenses fraudulent?
- Did he really receive anti-gay threats during his campaign, as he claimed?
- Is he really gay? On his MySpace profile he lists his sexual orientation as “straight,” while also saying he came out at the age of 31.
- How old is he? If he’s 32, as he says, it seems strange that he’d have graduated from high school in 1992, as he claims on his Facebook page. (Given his age, he would have graduated in 1997, unless he’s extraordinarily intelligent, which the evidence does not support.)
- Where is he from? His campaign literature says he’s from Dumferline, Illinois (pop: 300), but his MySpace page he says his “hometown” is “Diamond Bar California.” (As of 2005, he apparently lived in Park City, Kansas.)
- If he’s not a co-owner of Snap Fitness, what does he do for a living?
- Does anybody know where he is? Has he been seen since all of this came out in the past week?
In an interview published with a web-only, Florida-based, LGBT publication earlier this month, Halfaday said he’s considering running for council again in two years. Perhaps the silver lining here is that he finished seventh in a seven-way race—perhaps voters’ choices reflected their concerns.
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