Read the complete write-up of Madison Cawthorn net worth, age, wife, children, height, family, parents, signature, allegations, politics, party as well as other information you need to know.
Introduction
Madison Cawthorn is an American politician who has served as the U.S. representative for North Carolina’s 11th congressional district since 2021. A member of the Republican Party, he was elected to Congress in 2020 to succeed Republican Mark Meadows. Cawthorn is the youngest member of Congress since Jed Johnson Jr., as well as the first born in the 1990s. He describes himself as a Christian and a constitutional conservative. He has been criticized for his controversial rhetoric, including falsely asserting that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, although he has backtracked on the claim.
Early life
| Name | Madison Cawthorn |
| Net Worth | $4 million |
| Occupation | Politician |
| Height | 1.75m |
| Age | 26 years |
David Madison Cawthorn was born on August 1, 1995 (age 26 years) in Asheville, North Carolina, United States. He is the son of Priscilla Cawthorn and Roger Cawthorn. He was home-schooled in Hendersonville, North Carolina, through 12th grade, and played football with the Asheville Saints, a league that includes home-schooled high school students. As a teenager, he worked at a Chick-fil-A restaurant. In 2014, at age 18, Cawthorn was seriously injured while returning from a spring-break trip to Florida. He was riding as a passenger in a BMW X3 SUV near Daytona Beach, Florida when his friend Bradley Ledford fell asleep at the wheel. The SUV crashed into a concrete barrier while Cawthorn’s feet were on the dashboard.
In a 2017 speech, Cawthorn said that Ledford left him “to die in a fiery tomb”; Ledford publicly disputed this in 2021, saying that he pulled Cawthorn from the wreck once he escaped the vehicle. In their depositions, Cawthorn stated that he had “no memory from the accident”, while Ledford said that he had helped rescue an unconscious Cawthorn. In the same 2017 speech, Cawthorn declared that he was “declared dead on the scene” of the accident, but the official accident report listed Cawthorn as “incapacitated”. The injuries from the accident left Cawthorn partially paralyzed, and he now uses a wheelchair.
He said he accrued $3 million in medical debt during his recovery; he has received that amount as a settlement from an insurance company, as well as other payments, and as of February 2021 is seeking $30 million more. U.S. Representative Mark Meadows nominated Cawthorn to the United States Naval Academy in 2014, but his application was rejected before his 2014 car accident; Cawthorn had claimed during his congressional campaign in advertisements that the accident “derailed” his plans to attend the Academy.
Madison Cawthorn subsequently said that at the time of the injury, he knew only that he had been nominated to the Academy and that he had expected to be accepted, and added that he never said that he had been accepted before the accident took place, but could have applied again later. But in a lawsuit deposition, Cawthorn admitted that he had been rejected before the accident. During the fall 2016 semester, Cawthorn attended Patrick Henry College, studying political science, but earned mostly D grades and dropped out.
Cawthorn said his grades were low primarily because his injuries had interfered with his ability to learn. Cawthorn said in a deposition, “You know, suffering from a brain injury after the accident definitely I think it slowed my brain down a little bit. Made me less intelligent. And the pain also made reading and studying very difficult.” He also said he withdrew due to “heartbreak” after his fiancée broke up with him.
Career
Madison Cawthorn worked as a staff assistant in Representative Mark Meadows’s district office from January 2015 to August 2016. He told the Asheville Citizen-Times he worked there “full-time”, but it was a part-time role. Cawthorn is the owner and CEO of SPQR Holdings, LLC, a real estate investment firm in Hendersonville. The firm was started in August 2019 and reported no income; Cawthorn is its sole employee. As of August 2020, the company had been involved in only one real estate transaction, purchasing a 6-acre property for $20,000, in a foreclosure auction.
The initialism SPQR was commonly used as a symbol of the Roman Empire and stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus (“The Roman Senate and People”). The symbol has seen some far-right usage, but the Anti-Defamation League does not include SPQR in its hate symbol database, and the organization’s Mark Pitcavage has said it is used “just as much or more often by nonextremists than extremists”. Cawthorn has said he used the initials for his company name merely because it is “a term for Rome” and that “SPQR is a warning to my generation from the ages against tyranny and authoritarianism.”
U.S. House of Representatives
In the March 2020 Republican primary for North Carolina’s 11th congressional district, Madison Cawthorn finished second behind Lynda Bennett, who had been endorsed both by President Donald Trump and Cawthorn’s former mentor, Meadows, who had become White House Chief of Staff. But Bennett did not receive the required 30% of the vote to avoid a runoff and Cawthorn won the June runoff overwhelmingly. He was supported by many local leaders and endorsed by Mark Walker, the vice-chairman of the House Republican Conference. His victory has been called an upset. Cawthorn benefited from false and misleading claims that Bennett was a “Never-Trumper”.
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In 2017, Madison Cawthorn posted an Instagram picture of his visit to Adolf Hitler’s vacation residence Eagle’s Nest, which he said had been on his “bucket list for a while”. In the post he referred to Hitler as “the Führer”, Hitler’s official title. He also called Hitler “a supreme evil”. During the 2020 general campaign, the post generated criticism and allegations of far-right sympathies. In response, Cawthorn denied being a white supremacist, calling the allegations ridiculous, and said he “completely and wholeheartedly denounces any kind of white nationalism, any kind of Nazism”.
The Anti-Defamation League’s analyst Mark Pitcavage said he did not see much merit in the accusations against Cawthorn. Some Jewish residents of his congressional district expressed concern about the incident, including Esther Manheimer, mayor of Asheville, the district’s largest city. Cawthorn deleted the Instagram post on August 10. In July 2020, at an event at the Texas border, Cawthorn declared, without evidence, that there was “a large group of cartels, kidnapping our American children and then taking them to sell them on a slave market, a sex slave market”.
Madison Cawthorn spoke on the third day of the 2020 Republican National Convention. During his election bid, Cawthorn’s campaign created an attack website that criticized journalist Tom Fiedler, who had produced investigative pieces on Cawthorn and had written favorably about his opponent. The website accused Fiedler of leaving academia “to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” The sentence on the website was later modified to claim Fiedler is “an unapologetic defender of left-wing identity politics”.
Cawthorn released a statement saying he had intended “to condemn” such political opinion as being “dangerous and divisive” and said that he “condemned racism and identity politics throughout his campaign.” Ben Mathis-Lilley, writing for Slate, observed that Cawthorn’s apology “convolutedly expressed regret for ‘having unfairly implied I was criticizing Cory Booker,’ which is notable in that it is not an apology for attacking the journalist in question, Tom Fiedler, as a traitor to his race.” In the November general election, Cawthorn defeated Democratic nominee Moe Davis. He took office on January 3, 2021. Upon hearing he had won, he tweeted, “cry more, lib”.
On November 11, 2021, Cawthorn announced that he would run for a second term in the new 13th congressional district, which includes Cleveland County and other counties west of Charlotte. Members of Congress are not required to live in the district they represent but merely in the same state; Cawthorn is registered to vote in the new 14th district. He wrote on Twitter that he was running in the 13th district because otherwise “another establishment, go-along-to-get-along Republican would prevail there.” According to the Asheville Citizen-Times, opposition to Cawthorn in his current district, including by former supporters, “appears to provide a political rationale” for his decision.
In January 2022, a group of North Carolina voters formally challenged Cawthorn’s qualifications to run again, “citing his participation in a rally last January in Washington that questioned the presidential election outcome and preceded the Capitol riot.” The challenge is based on the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits anyone who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the U.S. government from holding public office. Under North Carolina law, the burden is on Cawthorn to prove that he is not an insurrectionist. The challenge was on hold while redistricting litigation continued. On February 28, 2022, after new maps were approved, Cawthorn filed to run again in the 11th District.
Madison Cawthorn filed suit in U.S. court to dismiss the challenge before it could be heard by the state elections board. The North Carolina attorney general’s office, citing a 1919 application of the amendment to a congressman who had violated the Espionage Act, argued that the Fourteenth Amendment could apply to Cawthorn “if a state board determines he aided or encouraged the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.” In March 2022, Judge Richard Myers ruled in Cawthorn’s favor based on an 1872 law that gave amnesty to Civil War insurrectionists. As of May 2022, the issue was in appeals court, where Cawthorn’s lawyer argued that the power to decide his eligibility belongs to Congress, not state election officials.
Tenure
Madison Cawthorn has been known for incendiary rhetoric and promulgating conspiracy theories during his candidacy and time in Congress. He had said he intended to use his position to be a messenger rather than a legislator, writing to his colleagues, “I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation.” Cawthorn subsequently closed all but one district office. In December 2020, at a Turning Point USA conference in Florida, Cawthorn said that he would try to contest the 2020 United States presidential election results when Congress counted the Electoral College votes in January, citing fraud, though there was no evidence that fraud affected the election results. He subsequently used conspiracy theories about fraud to run advertisements and raise money for himself. He called on the TPUSA event’s attendees to “lightly threaten” their representatives.
Cawthorn took his seat as U.S. Representative at the start of the 117th Congress on January 3, 2021. Before Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol on January 6, Cawthorn addressed the crowd and said, “this crowd has some fight.” He voted not to certify the Electoral College results in Congress and called Republicans who voted to certify the results “spineless cowards”. He repeated the false conspiracy theories that there was widespread fraud in the election. After the riots, Cawthorn denounced the violence and said, “The party as a whole should have been much more wise about their choice of words.” He later attempted to blame the riots on a “Democratic machine” of “agitators strategically placed inside of this group”, amid intensifying calls for his resignation for his part in stoking the riots.
On January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Cawthorn was one of 17 newly elected House Republicans to sign a letter congratulating him and expressing hope of bipartisan cooperation. On January 22, 2021, the government watchdog group Campaign for Accountability asked the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate Cawthorn’s role in the January 6 Capitol riot.
On January 23, 2021, on CNN Newsroom, Pamela Brown asked Cawthorn about his views of the election results, to which Cawthorn eventually responded that there was no voter fraud. He said, “You know, the Constitution allowed for us to be able to push back as much as we could and I did that to the amount of the constitutional limits that I had at my disposal. So now I would say that Joseph R. Biden is our president”. According to Time, Cawthorn was “trying to have it both ways. One day, he’s preaching about respecting the office of the Presidency and vowing to work across the aisle with Democratic colleagues. The next, he’s trumpeting dangerous conspiracies to right-wing crowds and commentators.”
In late February 2021, Madison Cawthorn and a dozen other Republican House members skipped votes and enlisted others to vote for them, citing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But he and the other members were actually attending the Conservative Political Action Conference, which was held at the same time as their absences. In response, the Campaign for Accountability, an ethics watchdog group, filed a complaint with the House Committee on Ethics and requested an investigation into Cawthorn and the other lawmakers. In July 2021, another ethics complaint was filed an against Cawthorn, by an aide to Representative David McKinley, after Cawthorn first scolded a McKinley aide and later got into a shouting match with McKinley over being listed as a co-sponsor of McKinley’s bill.
At an August 2021 Macon County, North Carolina, Republican Party event, Cawthorn said: “if our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place—and it’s bloodshed.” He then said, “as much as I am willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there is nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American”, with the only way to prevent that being “election security”.
In October 2021, Madison Cawthorn said, “our culture today is trying to completely de-masculate all of the young men”, because “they don’t want people who are going to stand up”. He issued a call to mothers, who he said are the “most vicious” conservatives: “If you are raising a young man, please raise them to be a monster”. In November 2021, Cawthorn accused politicians of “trying to make everyone genderless, sexless, and just absolutely Godless”, and declared that Americans “want our culture back, and if you want to stand in the way of that, we will run you over.”
Madison Cawthorn reacted to the not guilty verdict in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse by offering Rittenhouse an internship, saying, “You have a right to defend yourself, so be armed, be dangerous and be moral”. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Cawthorn called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “thug” and said “the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.” Cawthorn wrote on Twitter that his comments were based on Zelenskyy’s having allegedly spread misinformation directed at Americans. Alyssa Farah Griffin, for whom Cawthorn once interned, condemned his comments as based on ignorance and spreading Russian propaganda.
In a March 2022 interview, Cawthorn talked about “the sexual perversion that goes on in Washington” and said he had been invited to an orgy by an unnamed lawmaker. He also claimed that prominent Washington figures had used cocaine in front of him. In a closed-door meeting, multiple House Republicans complained about his comments. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise then met with Cawthorn. McCarthy later told reporters that Cawthorn had admitted his claims were exaggerated or untrue: “He changes what he tells and that’s not becoming of a congressman. He did not tell the truth and that’s unacceptable.” McCarthy said he had told Cawthorn that “He’s lost my trust. He’s going to have to earn it back.”
In April 2022, American Muckrakers PAC requested an ethics investigation of Cawthorn’s relationship with his aide Stephen Smith, Cawthorn’s second cousin. The request said that Cawthorn had provided more than $250 worth of free housing and travel to Smith, in violation of House rules, providing documents that appear to show Smith lives for free in a house owned by Cawthorn. The complaint also alleges that the two may have an inappropriate personal relationship, possibly sexual in nature, something prohibited between a lawmaker and a member of their staff.
On May 4, 2022, a video began circulating online showing Cawthorn naked in bed, thrusting his genitals towards another man’s face. Cawthorn said of the video that “Years ago, in this video, I was being crass with a friend, trying to be funny. We were acting foolish, and joking. That’s it.”
Political positions
Madison Cawthorn said that he would “like to be the face of the Republican Party when it comes to health care during his 2020 campaign. Cawthorn identifies as a constitutional conservative Republican and describes his position on abortion rights as pro-life or anti-abortion. In 2021, he joined the House Freedom Caucus, a caucus of conservative House Republicans. He describes himself as “fiscally conservative”, says his stance on immigration is “conservative”, and supports legal gun ownership, opposing gun control legislation.
Cawthorne supports legal same-sex marriage, but opposes gender transition treatments for minors. He also supports removing Confederate statues because they commemorate secession from the U.S, though in June 2021 he voted against a bill that would remove statues of white supremacists and Confederates from the U.S. Capitol.
Misconduct allegations
In August 2020, during Cawthorn’s campaign for Congress, several women accused him of sexually aggressive behavior, sexual misconduct, and sexual assault. Katrina Krulikas described an incident when she was 17 and Cawthorn was 19 in which he pressured her to sit on his lap and attempted to kiss her forcibly twice, which she resisted. Cawthorn did not deny the allegations, but said, “I did try and kiss her, just very normal, just in a flirtatious way”, adding, “If I did make her feel unsafe, I feel bad”, but questioned the timing of her allegation. His campaign characterized Krulikas’s allegations as politically motivated, which she denied. After Krulikas made her allegations, three other women made allegations of sexual misconduct against Cawthorn, including forcible grabbing and kissing. One woman said Cawthorn called her “just a little blonde, slutty American girl” when she rejected his sexual advances.
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On October 17, 2020, a group of Patrick Henry College alumni released a public letter accusing Cawthorn of “sexually predatory behavior” while he was a student there for little more than one semester, as well as of vandalism and lying. The letter originally had 10 signatories but the number increased to over 150 alumni in less than a week. Cawthorn claimed that most of the signers did not know him personally and his campaign posted a response letter of support for him signed by six alumni, two of whom work for Cawthorn’s campaign. Cawthorn’s response letter implied support by former Patrick Henry College President Michael Farris; Farris disavowed the support letter and asked that he not be associated with it.
A February 2021 BuzzFeed News investigation found 20 people who said that Cawthorn had harassed his female classmates during college; the reporters spoke to four women who said that he had harassed them. It was alleged that Cawthorn often recklessly drove women in his car to remote areas off campus while asking them sexual questions, which he called “fun drives”. Two resident assistants said they warned women to avoid Cawthorn and not to ride in his car. A male acquaintance said Cawthorn bragged about pulling a woman into his lap and putting a finger between her legs.
Other legal issues
In February 2021, Transportation Security Administration agents at the Asheville Regional Airport discovered an unloaded Glock 9mm handgun and loaded magazine in Cawthorn’s carry-on bag. A spokesman for Cawthorn said the gun, magazine and ammunition were meant to have been stowed in his checked luggage. In April 2022, Cawthorn was briefly detained at an airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, for attempting to board a commercial flight with a loaded handgun in his carry-on luggage. Police said he was cooperative, and he was cited for possession of a dangerous weapon on city property.
In March 2022, Madison Cawthorn was charged with driving while his license was revoked and while two speeding tickets were pending. He has a May 2022 court date and faces possible time in jail. A 2017 charge of driving on a revoked license was dismissed. In April 2022, Senator Thom Tillis called for an investigation into Cawthorn for possible violations of the STOCK Act, stating that Cawthrown’s purchase of an anti-Biden “Let’s Go Brandon” cryptocurrency without disclosure may have violated insider trading rules for members of Congress.
Wife
Madison Cawthorn is married to his longtime girlfriend Cristina Bayardelle, they had their wedding in December 2020 in a civil ceremony, followed by an April 2021 outdoor ceremony. His wife is a college student and competitive CrossFit athlete. In December 2021, Cawthorn announced that they were getting divorced. Cawthorn has claimed that he trained in wheelchair racing for the 2020 Summer Paralympics, but never competed at a qualifying level and was not involved in a team. Cawthorn describes himself as a Christian. He has an older brother, Zachary.
Madison Cawthorn net worth
How much is Madison Cawthorn worth? Madison Cawthorn net worth is estimated at around $4 million. His main source of income is from his career as a politician. Cawthorn successful career has earned him some luxurious lifestyles and some fancy cars trips. He is one of the richest and influential politicians in the United States. However, Cawthorn is the youngest Republican and one of the youngest members ever elected to the House of Representatives.