gotchanewsdaily.com 
Columbia, South Carolina
CNN
—
Brian Musgrave was out buying bird seed when he got the first hint that his life was about to be turned upside down. The text from someone he didn’t know just said he was going to be mentioned by South Carolina Rep, Nancy Mace in a speech on the floor of the US House of Representatives.
“First reaction was, what could that even be? It just didn’t make any sense,” Musgrave told CNN in an exclusive interview.
“I couldn’t think of a context where I would be named in a floor speech by Nancy Mace at all.”
But named he was. And labeled a predator, with his name and photograph displayed on a board in the chamber during the speech last month that was televised and available online.
Mace spoke for 53 minutes in a damning, personal address that has no precedent in the chamber’s history.
“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to call out the cowards who think they can prey on women and get away with it,” she began. “Today, I’m going scorched earth.”
Mace accused her ex-fiancé Patrick Bryant of rape and said he, Musgrave and two other men, recorded sex acts without consent. She displayed the names and pictures of the four men and their hometowns on a placard with warnings in block letters “PREDATORS,” “STAY AWAY FROM” and the seal of the US House of Representatives.
Musgrave said “Absolutely not” when asked if he had done any of the things Mace said he did. He also denied ever having witnessed any of the alleged crimes Mace talked about.
Bryant’s representative sent CNN a statement after numerous attempts to reach him. In it, he denied all “criminal allegations.” Another of the men, Eric Bowman, told CNN in a statement that “no wrongdoing has been committed.” CNN was unable to reach the fourth man that Mace named.
The four men are all entrepreneurs in South Carolina but did not have national name recognition before their reputations and personal lives were tarnished in Mace’s speech.
Mace, a Republican congresswoman who’s talked openly about her personal trauma and cast herself as a GOP voice for women, declined interview requests by CNN and referred us back to her speech.
‘Catastrophic’ impact
As she spoke on the House floor, Mace laid her hand on a Bible and swore to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
Musgraves said the only true thing told about him was that he’s an old friend of Bryant –he was best man at Bryant’s first wedding – and they own a rental condo together in Isle of Palms on the South Carolina coast, near Charleston and Fort Sumter. He said he did not believe the allegations against Bryant.
Mace said she found more than 10,000 hidden camera videos and photos after Bryant gave her access to his phone when they were still a couple but didn’t provide any evidence. She said the assaults she uncovered in November 2023 spanned “over a decade, almost 20 years.” South Carolina Law Enforcement, known as SLED, told CNN in a statement they are investigating, and the subject of their inquiries is Bryant. CNN has confirmed that videos do exist, but a source would not comment on the contents. CNN has not obtained nor reviewed any videos or photos.
Musgrave said the condo he owns with Bryant is outfitted with a camera in plain sight in the kitchen, though it’s unclear if that is one of the cameras Mace was referring to. “The most control I could have over that camera would be to unplug it,” Musgrave said.
He denied ever having a password or any control over that camera, which was installed to monitor use of the condo, or ever viewing any of the video that it may have recorded. His lawyers said he had never hidden any camera anywhere on the property.
For Musgrave, the impact of the speech in February has been “catastrophic,” he said.
“For the rest of my life, when someone Googles ‘Brian Musgrave’ this is going to be the thing that comes up,” he said. “I’m completely uncertain what tomorrow is going to be business-wise.”
His wife, Jen, said the speech seemed like a bad dream. “He’s nowhere near any of those things that she was accusing him of,” she told CNN. “Anyone who knows him, there’s just no way it would ever be possible so to have someone say something like that, in public, it just blew my mind.”
“It made me mad to think that someone could say that without an ounce of truth behind it,” she added.
Libel, or protected speech?
The Speech or Debate clause in Article 1 of the US Constitution talks of Representatives and Senators and how “for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”
But Musgrave’s lawyer, Eric Bland, challenges whether that gives Mace immunity. “You can’t use the House floor as a bullhorn to destroy people,” he told CNN. “That’s not why you’re elected to office. I don’t think that’s what the protections were intended to do.”
Bland and his co-counsel Ronnie Richter pointed out that Mace went beyond the House floor by posting her speech on social media and displaying the poster board with the men’s faces outside her office.
They told CNN they have seen “zero evidence” their client did anything wrong.
“What we want is to put a period on the conversation about Brian Musgrave, to try to restore his good name and reputation. When she posted that speech on X, it’s now up to 1.8 million views,” Richter said.
Bland added, “His daughter goes to college, his son’s in high school. They have to answer for (their) father being an alleged rapist, an alleged predator, and an alleged sex trafficker.”
The lawyers sent a letter to Mace requesting that she either provide evidence that links their client to the alleged acts or retract her allegations against Musgrave and issue an apology.
Instead, a representative for the House General Counsel, acting as one of Mace’s lawyers, responded with his own letter, noting he believes that “SLED is investigating the matter” and “any request for such evidence should be directed to SLED.”
Bland called that a “typical government response, a non-answer.”
A South Carolina attorney for Nancy Mace did not respond to requests for comment on Musgrave’s accusations.
Mace’s high-profile past
Mace, now in her third term as representative for South Carolina’s District 1, has long been outspoken on various issues.
She shared an emotional account of being raped as a teenager in a debate about an abortion bill in the South Carolina legislature before being elected to Congress.
She took office just before the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol, and told CNN that President Donald Trump’s “entire legacy was wiped out” that day. She beat a primary challenge from a Trump-backed candidate in the 2022 midterm elections and after endorsing Trump over her former ally Nikki Haley in 2024, Trump went on to call her “a strong conservative voice.”
She roiled her own party when she was one of eight House Republicans who voted to oust then Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023.
And Mace, who has stood up for some rights to abortion and encouraged the GOP to better show it is ‘pro-woman,’ introduced a bill to ban transgender women from using women’s restrooms at the US Capitol in November, after Delaware elected Sarah McBride as the first transgender person to serve in Congress. She attended and was name-checked by Trump as he signed an executive order banning transgender women from women’s sports.
She told The Associated Press in January she was “seriously considering” running to be South Carolina governor next year. A potential rival could be state Attorney General Alan Wilson, son of Mace’s House colleague Rep. Joe Wilson. She pointed a finger at him during her speech, when she also quoted from the Bible and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“If Alan Wilson won’t do his job as attorney general, I will do it for him,” she said. “It is your duty to prosecute rape and sexual assault and sex trafficking. You brag about protecting women and girls for the last 15 years and you’ve done nothing about it.”
In a statement, Wilson’s office told CNN, “Mace either does not understand or is purposefully mischaracterizing the role of the attorney general. At this time, our office has not received any reports or requests for assistance from any law enforcement or prosecution agencies regarding these matters.”
Brian Musgrave said Mace owes him an apology. His wife said she wants his name cleared.
Musgrave’s lawyers said they have invited Mace and her team to talk to them away from the House floor and its protections, but that offer was not addressed in the response from the government lawyer.
“To choose the House floor and think that she has an absolute sanctuary to libel an innocent person and defame them, to destroy them personally and their family — we’re not just going to sit by and let that happen,” Bland said.
For Brian Musgrave, who lives in a different part of the state to Mace’s district, where and why Mace named him is almost immaterial.
“It doesn’t change the fact that it happened,” he said. “Our lives have been completely upended. We will never be able to go back to the way things were for us, which was nice and quiet and happy.”
