David and Charles Koch are billionaire brothers behind Americans for Prosperity and the Tea Party Movement. But they're not the only politically active Kochs in the throwing money at politicians in 2012. There is a third Koch, a Bill Koch, who has given seven figures to Mitt Romney's SuperPAC, and he's got a marital history that would make Newt Gingrich blush.
Bill Koch is the founder and CEO of Oxbow Corporation, a mining company that deals in coal and petroleum-based products. Although for awhile he wasn't as vocal about his political views as his conservative stalwart brothers, he's donated more than a million bones to Romney's SuperPAC during the last quarter of last year, with nary an end in sight. But enough of that. Let's get to the important, tabloidy stuff. Namely, that Bill Koch is a serial philanderer with at least one incident of domestic violence in his history.
Bill reportedly kept several mistresses at once. In 1995, a year after he married Joan Granlund, he attempted to evict his mistress Catherine de Castelbajac from the condo he owned at the Four Seasons. Castelbajac sued, saying he'd promised to support her financially, and Koch eventually won. During court proceedings, it was revealed that in addition to his wife and Castelbajac, there were other mistresses. One of whom would eventually become the mother of his daughter. Castlebajac would sometimes send the billionaire lurid faxes in an effort to, I don't know, make people laugh really hard at her in 2012. One read "Hot Love from Your X-rated Protestant Princess."
But sexy faxes and mistresses weren't the most scandalous aspects of Bill Koch's dating life. In 1996, he married again, this time taking as his bride a woman 18 years his junior who he wasn't seeing at the time of the palimony trial. In 2000, police were called to one of the Koch houses and Bill's wife Angela reported that he'd punched her in the stomach while holding the couple's one-year-old daughter. Angela refrained from pressing charges in exchange for a divorce settlement, but not before messy proceedings wherein both of them accused the other of having drinking problems and Angela accused Bill of hiring a private detective to follow her around Palm Beach. He's now remarried to Bridget Rooney, the granddaughter of the founder of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Koch's donations to Romney's SuperPAC put him among the candidate's top six donors.
I guess it's not completely absurd that a man like Bill Koch has donated over a million dollars to a candidate like Romney, who courts voters by flaunting his family values credentials. After all, Bill Koch probably loves families, too. He's made like half a dozen of them.
And in case Romney hasn't gotten his fill of Koch in his dealings with (or for) Bill, he'll get more Koch time tomorrow, when he speaks at a fundraiser for Charles and David Koch's Americans for Prosperity.
Bill Koch and Oxbow Donate $1 Million to Romney SuperPac [Broward Palm Beach New Times]