Royce White, the George Floyd protest leader and former college basketball star turned right-wing Senate candidate in Minnesota, has been forced to play catch-up after falling behind on court-mandated child support payments for at least half a dozen times from 2020 to 2023, court records in two cases show.
White, a father of four, was twice convicted of contempt of court over the findings, once in a Minnesota county where he remains for “constructive contempt,” facing the continued threat of a 180-day jail sentence if again. do not comply with payments. The next hearing in that case is scheduled for October 21, two weeks before the election.
White’s candidacy generated new attention after the Minnesota Republican Party endorsed him this month at its state convention, where he won the support of two-thirds of voting delegates. He previously lost the GOP primary in a 2022 bid to unseat Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar and raised a paltry sum for his Senate campaign, according to campaign finance records. But he caught fire among conservatives by delivering rousing speeches and directing incendiary and vulgar comments at critics and opponents online.
White still has to survive a contentious GOP primary, but the state party has elevated him as former president Donald Trump and his campaign are making noise about turning Minnesota red at the presidential level this fall for the first time since 1972. It’s been more than 20 years since a Republican won a Senate seat in the state. And several GOP strategists don’t think White brings them any closer to defeating Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar in November.
Speaking to reporters last week, Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of the Senate GOP, said the campaign committee is looking for “candidates who can win both the primary as the generals.” Of White, Daines said, “I think he would have a hard time winning the general election.”
Asked whether the campaign committee would support White if he were the candidate, Daines responded, “I don’t think he can win the general election.” Daines Committee I had warmer things to say this month about Joe Fraser, a retired Navy commander and business executive who is a first-time candidate, whom an NRSC spokesman called “a political outsider and American hero.” Trump himself did not make any endorsements in the race.
In recent years, as Trump’s MAGA movement has become the dominant force in the Republican Party, he and allied Republicans have boosted a series of statewide candidates with blemishes on their backgrounds who have captured the attention of voters in swing states. These candidates underperformed in the 2022 elections in particular.
In an interview as well as in long essays he posted online in advance Since his first candidacy, White has described himself as a loving father who cares for all of his children and has described the family court system as deeply unfair to men. White, a first-round pick in the 2012 NBA draft, was initially rated in arrears based on his NBA salary, although he played only a handful of games in the league while publicly battling an anxiety disorder. The courts reduced the total amount he had to pay each month due to the end of his NBA career, but he has since struggled to keep up with his payments.
“Talk about some real issues,” White said in the interview. “A lot of people have alimony. Many people have alimony. Many people have alimony. All you liberals really just want to embarrass people with kids because you’re so fucking anti-human. And that. I love my children. And I’m up to date with my child support. I pay more child support than probably many people in this country do in their lifetime. It’s not really a problem.”
The details of the cases
In Ramsey County, Minnesota, a court held White in contempt in 2018 after he failed to keep up with his payments, according to court documents. After increasing his monthly child support payments from $350 to $794 because of his contract with Big3 Basketball, the court said he was unable to keep up with payments in 2020, 2021 and 2022, court records show. He was ordered to pay more than $17,000 over those three years to avoid prison. The court found he was up to date with his payments as of February 2023 and reduced the monthly amount due.
In a separate case in Cottonwood County, Minnesota, a court found White in contempt in 2020 after he failed to comply with his child support order, according to court records. The court found he was behind on child support payments in 2022 and 2023 and ordered him to make larger one-time payments weeks after his hearings in both years. Before a hearing last month, the court said White had complied with the conditions of his contempt agreement and paid the necessary support. But it also decided he needed to create a structured payment plan to meet all of his child support obligations by July 1.
White said the media was asking about his child support because of a broader effort to “paint me as another far-right darling.”
“I am completely current on my child support obligations as of today. My delay only stems from a time when I was court ordered to pay child support and support the child support with an NBA salary. That’s how I got left behind,” he said. “And the interest rates are so high that if I paid my child support on time every month, the interest would be exactly the same.”
Michael Brodkorb, former vice chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party, said Republicans “ignored” White’s judgments and debts, adding that he was not “properly vetted.”
“It’s up to the public to determine whether something is fair or not,” Brodkorb said of White’s insistence that the issue is irrelevant to his candidacy. “And they will decide whether this is relevant to the race. I think so.
Brodkorb, who is not a fan of Trump but wants to see Republicans win in Minnesota, has also experienced personal controversies, have been involved in a serious accident while driving under the influence of alcohol 11 years ago, when he was at the height of his political career.
“It’s a con game for him to try to say these things don’t matter,” Brodkorb said. “There is overwhelming evidence that these types of questions, these types of distractions, are not good for candidates.”
White said the endorsement from the Minnesota Republican Party “has nothing to do with me misleading people or [its] not knowing enough information about my past.”
“They don’t care, because they know that people like you are more likely to fuck them than the fact that I owe tens of thousands in child support,” White said in the interview. “They know better. So y’all better get your heads out of the shit, because I’m telling you the pendulum swings both ways. And I say that as a warning, not to be threatening. I see this as a real cautionary tale.”
An unorthodox political rise
White’s political rise and evolution are a story in themselves. A basketball star at Iowa State University and a first-round draft pick of the Houston Rockets in 2012, he has battled mental health issues and garnered positive attention for his efforts to get the NBA to take mental health more seriously. He ended up playing just three league games.
With The murder of George Floyd in the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020, White led some Black Lives Matter protests in his home state and became a central figure in the protests there. He has appeared on MSNBC’s primetime programming for discuss issues at the heart of the movement.
An appearance on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show caught the attention of Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House staffer and right-wing media personality who is influential in the MAGA movement. Later, Bannon became interested in the fact that White had led protests against the Federal Reserve in Minneapolis, and an intermediary who knew both men – and learned that White was a fan of Bannon’s program – connected them.
“He has rough edges,” Bannon, one of White’s most prominent defenders, said in an interview. “He has some views that I obviously don’t agree with, but he is a patriot. He is a leader, a warrior. He is a rising star in the MAGA movement.”
Delving into electoral politics, White gained attention for his incendiary language and use of epithets online. He posted slurs about former Vice President Mike Pence, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and other political figures and used a homophobic slur – which he posted several times on X – to describe reporters who wrote stories about him.
On your podcastWhite said Trump “could get on stage, drop his pants, take a beating from the podium, and I would still never vote for you damn Democrats again.”
At the convention where he won the state’s Republican Party endorsement for Senate, White said he supported Trump “unequivocally,” adding that the election “is not about my personal failures and shortcomings.”
He campaigned against the appropriation of aid to Ukraine, rising federal debt, and the rise of illegal immigration and “forever wars.” At the convention, he promised to filibuster all omnibus legislation — bills covering multiple subjects combined into a single package.
In light of his controversies, Brodkorb said, White “is the least qualified and ill-prepared candidate ever to be endorsed in modern times by a major political party in this state.”
But White’s allies see the issues less as baggage than as relatable biographical points for some of the working-class voters the party needs to convert to have any hope of defeating Klobuchar in the fall.
“He is far from a perfect person. It is a very flawed instrument,” Bannon said. “But the last time I looked at MAGA, we found some pretty flawed instruments that worked really well.”
Darrin Rosha, a former member of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents who nominated White at the state convention, said he gravitated toward White after seeing local conservatives energized by some of his recent speeches, adding that he had to Look up Bannon on Wikipedia because, Rosha said, he is “not big on federal issues.” He acknowledged that White has “a lot of what people would describe as baggage,” adding that his wife was concerned about White’s “salty language.”
“Some of the Republicans who were somewhat surprised by my strong support for Royce and my nomination of Royce were concerned that Democrats would simply go to town because of his background,” Rosha said. “And I simply explained, ‘This is politics; you could support Mother Teresa, and people will find out things about her.’”
He added: “It certainly should be more interesting than the typical center-cast Republican candidate.”
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
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