NC GOP congressional candidate accused of domestic violence, lies

Two ex-husbands, and at one point her daughter, accused 1st Congressional District nominee Sandy Smith of domestic violence, including taking a run at one of them with a car.

Posted 8:00 a.m. May 29, 2022 — Updated 8:00 a.m. May 29, 2022

Travis Fain

, WRAL state government reporter

Two ex-husbands of the Republican nominee for an eastern North Carolina congressional seat have accused her of violence and dishonesty, with one saying she raced toward him years ago in his own Ford Mustang.

First Congressional District nominee Sandy Smith’s daughter also accused her of abuse, saying in a 2012 petition for a protective order—which was later dismissed—that Smith “held me down by my hair and punched me in the face with a closed fist.”

Smith declined interview requests, but on Friday she said on social media that allegations against her are false. She said that she and her children are domestic violence survivors. She is the victim in her former marriages, she says, not the other way around.

“It’s sad that the current political process allows for smears that truly hurt families with such hateful mistruths,” Smith said on Twitter.

The allegations against Smith largely come from divorce records in Washington state and Georgia, as well as her daughter’s Lenoir county protection order petition. They’re likely to be a theme of attack ads ahead of the general election.

Smith’s May 17 GOP primary opponent, Rocky Mount Mayor Sandy Roberson, put these documents and others online two weeks before election day.

Roberson’s campaign and the Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee that works to elect Republicans, used the allegations in campaign commercials, with the Leadership Fund spending more than half a million dollars against Smith.

Smith won anyway, by about 2,000 votes. Now she faces the Democratic nominee, state Sen. Don Davis, in a district that leans toward Democrats. That lean probably hurts Smith in the November general election more than revelations about her past, Catawba College political scientist Michael Bitzer said.

“We’ve seen past candidates win with questionable private lives,” Bitzer said. “I think the politics of candidate qualities and characteristics are probably pretty low on the totem pole when it comes to partisan voting patterns, just because people are party loyalists.”

WRAL News interviewed both of Smith’s ex-husbands, and they repeated accusations from the divorce proceedings.

“I know the real Sandra,” said Randy Auman, who divorced Smith in 1997. “She’ll lie through her teeth.”

“I don’t trust a single thing that comes out of her mouth,” said Eric Goranson, who was married to Smith for about two years in Washington. They divorced in 2009.

Goranson said that he saw Smith drag her daughter, who was about 11 at the time, “backwards down the hallway screaming at her.” Goranson said he and Smith argued about the incident, and that a week later he woke up to Smith trying to “bash my head in with the alarm clock.”

Goranson said he ran to the bathroom and that Smith “broke the door into the bathroom.”

“She went and got a broom and was trying to use that against me,” he said. “Chased me around the living room a little bit. … Next business day I was down there at the courthouse filing for divorce.”

Parts of Goranson's story, albeit without names, were included in a 2014 book: Abuse OF men BY women: It happens, it hurts, and it's time to get real about it.

In a her own filings from the couple's divorce proceedings, Smith said Goranson was lying, and she accused him of domestic violence.

"He threatened to break my arm and called me horrible names," she said in a declaration attached to the case.

Frying pan

The pattern was familiar to Auman.

“She’d like to take a swing now and then,” said Auman, adding that he was a Marine and that “taking a swing at me was kind of a joke.”

“She’d throw a punch every now and then, wouldn’t land it,” he said. “Couple of slaps landed. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention because it wasn’t going to hurt me.”

One of Roberson’s campaign commercials said that Smith “battered her first husband with a frying pan.” Auman said that takes it too far.

“[Smith] picked up a frying pan a time or two,” he said. “Never really swung a frying pan at me.”

Smith did take a run at him with his car, according to Auman.

They’d been arguing that day before she dropped him off at work, he said. “She swung that thing around … I could hear my car rev up. I looked back and she had that thing darting in my direction,” he said. “I was smart enough to get out of the way.”

Auman said he wasn’t sure if Smith was trying to hit him or just scare him, but that if he hadn’t moved “it would have been a direct hit.”

“You couldn’t always tell what was crossing her mind,” Auman said. “I wouldn’t have put it past her that the thought crossed her mind to flatten me.”

Soon after Roberson’s commercial ran, accusing her of beating Auman with a frying pan and trying to run him over, Smith denied the accusations on social media. She said they were dismissed by a judge and she threatened a lawsuit against “people peddling these lies.”

She also promised to take a frying pan to Congress.

'With a closed fist'

In July of 2012, Smith’s teenage daughter sought a domestic violence protection order against her mother.

They had fought, Tiffany Anderson said at the time, because her mother was “trying to force me to go into the military.” Smith yelled, Anderson said in the petition, and “told me I’m going to be nothing in life.”

“She pushed and shoved me, she slapped me, pulled my hair, pulled me to the ground and sat on me,” Anderson said in the petition. “She held me down by my hair and punched me in the face with a closed fist.”

Anderson also said in the petition that she was assaulted “on multiple occasions.” About a week after the petition was filed, it was dismissed at Anderson’s request, according to the paperwork.

Attempts to reach Anderson, 26, were not successful. Smith said on social media that she and her daughter have a strong relationship, and her campaign website features a picture of Smith and a young woman in uniform.

“Sandy’s family has served in the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marines,” the caption states. “She is a proud military mother as her oldest honorably served as a United States Marine.”

Auman said he’s not in touch with Anderson, or with another child that he and Smith share. He accused Smith of lying about him to the kids.

Goranson, Smith’s second husband, said Auman sent Christmas gifts for the children to Washington, but that Smith was angry to find them under the tree.

She “rewrapped them with her name on them,” Goranson said.

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