LITTLE ROCK — A spokesman for Sen. Mark Pryor says a purported internship with his office offered as a prize for the winner of a show created by the founder of Girls Gone Wild is a hoax.
Lisa Ackerman, press secretary for Pryor, said the office does not "sell, auction or donate internships" and added later that it has asked authorities to investigate.
"We believe someone outside Senator Pryor’s office has broken the law by fraudulently impersonating a U.S. Senator, fraudulently attempting to sell a government position and using the Senate seal without authorization. We have asked the FBI to fully investigate who is perpetrating this fraud against the senator and the U.S. Senate.
Ackerman called the ploy "the kind of stupid, out-of-left field attacks you will see" as the 2014 election cycle gets under way.
Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis said in a news release Tuesday that the four-week summer internship with Pryor's office was purchased at a private auction earlier this month and then added to the prize package for the show, which airs on HDNet.
Francis said in the release that he decided to buy the internship as a prize because women do not have enough representation in Washington D.C.
The Democratic Party of Arkansas called the claim an attack that represents all that is wrong with Washington.
“These sort of conjured-up attacks are exactly the kind of rhetoric that has broken Washington and are constant distractions from addressing the issues facing our nation," Candace Martin said. "The porn industry has joined an Arkansas Republican activist in attempts at manufacturing outlandish attacks on Arkansas’s U.S. Senator."
Martin called on Arkansas Republicans to condemn the hoax story.