Victor Marx, the GOP nominee in Colorado's gubernatorial race, has centered his Christian faith throughout his campaign. He's made guest appearances at church services across the state since he announced his candidacy last fall.
We reported earlier this week that many of these churches violated their tax-exempt status in promoting Marx as a candidate. But something else caught our eye while working on this story.
Marx opens his appearances with a video. Dramatic music accompanies quick flashes of clips and images that move so quickly it’s hard to actually process what you’re looking at. Marx appears in most of them—serving in the military, demonstrating martial arts skills, with his wife, and serving missions in other countries.
The clips he doesn’t appear in show buildings exploding, hands on a gun, children laughing, or a cross in a field. It’s common for politicians to curate a particular energy using evocative photos and videos that have nothing to do with them, like someone grocery shopping, a flag waving in the wind, or a family at the dinner table.
One of the clips in Marx’s video stands out. It shows a teenage girl wearing a headscarf that covers both her hair and her lower face. A teardrop falls from one of her eyes and darkens the yellow fabric covering her cheeks. Its placement among clips of Marx in the Middle East gives the impression that it is connected to one of his high-risk missions.
That’s not the case. The clip appeared in a 2015 PBS NewsHour segment in which correspondent Marcia Biggs spoke with Yazidi women in Northern Iraq who had escaped captivity by ISIS militants.
The girl in the yellow headscarf recounted a harrowing story; she was trafficked, sexually assaulted, and captured during her first escape attempt. She "walked the final hours on a road littered with bombs" to the safety of a refugee camp.
We reached out to Biggs to see if Marx may have had any role in this camp while she was working on the story. She told us, “No, I never encountered him at that camp, and NewsHour Productions neither gave permission nor licensed that imagery to his campaign.” She also said it was "A rather bold move to use a shot that distinctive.”
The footage is particularly notable given Marx’s claims about rescuing women and children from captivity during high-risk missions, which have received a lot of pushback. It didn’t help when 9News reporter Kyle Clark asked him to clarify the number of individuals he's rescued. Marx refused to give a straight answer, claiming, "I'd say it's more than one... and fewer than a bunch."
Marx's use of a clip to which he has no affiliation is not out of step with most political advertising. But using an unlicensed clip of a vulnerable minor in a video presented as part of his life story raises questions about how the campaign assembled and presented the imagery, and how much of the story Marx’s campaign presents to voters is actually his to tell.
We contacted the Marx campaign for comment but did not receive a response before publication.
