The former husband of Rep. Katie Porter said the California Democrat frequently abused him verbally and threw “toys, books and other objects” at him during their marriage — even pouring scalding-hot mashed potatoes on his head during a fight, according to divorce records.
Matthew Hoffman, who filed for divorce from Porter in 2013, said in a request for a restraining order dated April 30 of that year that he was “routinely” called a “f—ing idiot” and “f—ing incompetent” by his rage-prone spouse, who also shattered a glass coffee pot on their kitchen counter in March 2012 when she felt their house wasn’t clean enough.
“She would not let me have a cell phone because she said, ‘You’re too f—ing dumb to operate it,’” Hoffman said of Porter, 49, who has also been accused of ridiculing former members of her staff.
“When she gets angry, she will claw and scratch her arms and then say to me ‘Look what you made me do!’” Hoffman also said in the records, first obtained by DailyMail.com. “She regularly says that I am a bad parent in front of the kids … Recently the children began spitting at me and throwing their food at me, calling me ‘bad daddy.’”
In 2006, Hoffman said, Porter took issue with how Hoffman was preparing mashed potatoes for dinner, asking him: “Can’t you read the f—ing instructions!” Then, her ex-husband said, Porter raised a “ceramic bowl of steaming hot potatoes and dumped it on my head, burning my scalp.”
In response to Hoffman’s allegations, Porter, then a professor of bankruptcy law at the University of California, Irvine, in Orange County, claimed in her own request for a restraining order that her ex ordered her out of the house on April 24, 2013, and called her a “dumb bitch,” a “despicable person” and “f—ing evil” before adding that she should “rot in hell.”
According to Porter, Hoffman then raged at the couple’s son Luke, telling the child: “You have taken a bad situation and made it a thousand times worse.” Hoffman also allegedly punched a bathroom light switch until it shattered and threw a newspaper at her.
In her first congressional campaign, Porter referred to herself as a “victim of domestic violence” and her House biography touts her as “a single mom of three school-aged kids.”
