Louisiana lawmaker investigated for sexting teenage boy says ‘I’m not gay’
Mike Yenni, the president of Louisiana’s Jefferson Parish, has admitted to exchanging sexually explicit messages with a boy who was 17 at the time, but insists he isn’t gay, according to Gay Star News.
The 40-year-old Republican, who is married to a woman, was revealed to have sent explicit messages to the 17-year-old earlier this year but, speaking to Fox 8, states that “nothing was acted upon.”
“You know, there was… there was no sex, you know? Everybody thinks, oh, something sexual happened. But there was no sex.”
According to reports, the pair met at a function for the teen’s Catholic high school when Yenni was mayor of Kenner, Louisiana in 2015.
While the age of consent in Louisiana is 17, exchanging sexual content is illegal with someone under the age of 18.
Printouts of the messages between the pair suggest that Yenni allegedly told the teen he wanted him naked, wanted to perform a sex act on him and proposed a three-way with an older teen who put them in contact.
With an FBI investigation underway, Yenni has claimed that what happened between them was “taken out of context.”
“They think these things… they think things were acted upon. They think there was, you know… this was over a period, you know, the total time frame, probably less than two weeks.”
“I really believe that, the way they’ve thrown these words out there, and the way… the way they’ve tried to allude to certain things… by trying to define me as a person I’m not.”
“By his pleadings… like, in other words, what he’s trying to say in his pleadings, ‘He is a pedophile, he is an admitted homosexual. And that is simply not true. I’ve never admitted that. It doesn’t define me either… to simply say, I’m not gay.”
The teenager, who is now 19 and has blocked Yenni’s number, claims that the pair met in a bathroom where they kissed and the teen was given designer underwear as a gift.
Yenni denies that they met in a bathroom or exchanged underwear.
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