State candidate claims personal number was doxxed in vicious messages

A Downriver State House candidate declaring victory following a campaign that turned so ugly, so vicious, she says her personal phone number and the landline belonging to her own parents were doxxed and posted tons of campaign messaging against her. Fox News' Dave Kinchin spoke with the state rep-elect, and he joins us now live in Wyandotte with a look at how this all went down. Dave. Yeah, Representative-elect Church has won back the House seat she held just two years ago. She says she's glad to have all of this behind her. But take a look. This is the campaign that she was dealing with here. Church says she battled opposition campaign mailers and robo-text messages like these on your screen that showed her personal cell phone number with some even posting her parents' contact information, their landline, the messaging urged voters to oppose her candidacy and legislative agenda. And some of it was traced Back to the Michigan Republican Party. Churches says it led to unsettling voicemails like this. Oh, Jamie, just give it up. Get a day job. You know what you look like? A waitress. All right, honey, just give it up. I'm not voting for you. Letting. What's her name? Riley. Grozeel. That's where I live. Grozeel. I vote for her. She's cuter than you two. Thank you. Well, the state GOP disputed the allegations with Fox 2 last month, telling us that Churches had shared her own phone number multiple times in multiple formats, including handwritten notes on campaign literature, official candidacy filing documents, and posted it publicly on the Internet. But she says a clear line was crossed. When you're a public figure, unfortunately there are things like death threats and other things that occur and sometimes it's unclear whether someone is just upset and sharing a concern or if they have other intentions and being able to differentiate is this just an upset concern or is this someone that could potentially cause harm and then having that constantly be something that you're thinking about and I don't think that people should should be put through that when they're running for office because that already has It happens already in real life, but to encourage more of that in order to win an election I think is inappropriate. Now, she was not the only member of her caucus to go through this. Remember, of the Democratic candidates running for the state House, the Michigan House Democratic Fund says at least four other candidates in their party dealt with this, too. Had the same thing happened, we checked, and all four of them won their races as well. Tonight on The Edge, how they look to move forward as the Democratic caucus in the House. We talked with Representative-elect Churches about that. And issues like affordability, bringing costs down, we take a look at that tonight on The Edge. Reporting live in Wyandotte, Dave Kinchin, Fox 2 News. I mean, Dave, I understand the point that the Republican Party is making in that some of these numbers are already out there. However, targeting it into a specialized text or email and then blasting it out there, that does kind of put the person in a position to be a target. Yeah, it does. And one of the things you'll typically see, we talked about this last month, is mailers that have the campaign office information, like a campaign office phone number, or if it's an incumbent, their official government phone number that voters can call to complain about issues. Not a personal phone number and certainly not the parents of the candidate and their number as well. So clearly, this is something that hasn't happened a lot before. Yeah, a lot of people very grateful this particular election cycle is over. It got ugly in a lot of races. Dave Kinchin for us live tonight. Dave, thank you.