James Fishback’s Very Weird Groyper Wedding
Who would be crazy enough to marry a racist groyper running for governor? This woman.
FAR-RIGHT FLORIDA GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE James Fishback tried his boldest campaign gambit yet on Saturday: getting married in a Catholic church to a mystery woman he met just a few months ago.
By Wednesday, the honeymoon already appeared to be over. At a press conference, Fishback urged his new wife to take the stage to answer questions, saying he expected one about her perfume. But when he realized instead that the question was about education policy, he told his bride to step away.
“Stand there and look good,” Fishback said, nudging his wife to back off. Who says romance is dead?
The surprise marriage has been one of the stranger twists in the saga of Fishback’s campaign—a campaign that doesn’t appear destined for the governor’s mansion but that has polled surprisingly well against Trump-endorsed Rep. Byron Donalds (R) and has offered a glimpse into the kind of extreme politics that can succeed with young conservatives.
The new wedding also raises a question: What would possess a woman to rush to the altar with the racist, scheming, heavily indebted Fishback?
In an email, Fishback told me he met his wife at a Miami bookstore. They started dating three months ago, he said, adding that they connected in part over a desire to marry quickly instead of slogging through “the modern culture of mindless dating.”
The most striking thing about the news of the wedding was that Fishback wasn’t marrying the woman whom he introduced for months as his girlfriend. Since December, Fishback had been showing up at campaign events with a woman named Francesca “Frankie” Raine. Though Raine also seemed to appear out of nowhere, the couple was moving fast towards a nuptial. In a January appearance on pro-Trump personality Patrick Bet-David’s podcast, a panelist asked Fishback if Raine was his “wife.” He replied succinctly: “Yeah.”
Yet sometime around February, Raine was out of the picture, replaced by the new Valeria Fishback—maiden name Valeria Quimby-Moro.
The reaction on the right has been mixed. While one devoted Fishback acolyte praised the marriage, which took place in front of roughly two dozen people, as the biggest political wedding since John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette tied the knot, groyper-world commentator “Chad Champion” fumed that Fishback had married “just some e-girl.”
“A month before your election, you just swap out your wife,” complained the buff pundit, who appears shirtless except for a balaclava.
THE NEW MRS. FISHBACK has one clear advantage over her jilted rival: Her internet presence was locked down before their marriage became public. As far-right activist and Fishback foe Laura Loomer relished in pointing out back in January, Raine had a previous life as a sort of cryptocurrency babe named “Crypto Barbie,” who sold burlesque, scantily clad NFTs of herself.
How would that play in Tallahassee?
As Fishback’s wedding loomed, Raine appeared to freak out on X, posting pictures of herself in a wedding dress and claiming Fishback dumped her because of political pressure. On Wednesday, she quipped that Valeria would become the “first lady of Rumble”—the right’s second-tier alternative to YouTube. Later that day, she vowed to “spill all the tea,” presumably about how things ended with Fishback.
Despite Valeria Fishback’s attempts to make her social media history private, there are a couple clues to what might lead a woman to rush into a wedding with a gubernatorial hopeful. A 2020 article in a Miami Catholic publication notes that Valeria attended an online high school because of “depression and difficulties at school”—pre-pandemic. As the Miami New Times notes, Valeria Fishback’s Pinterest page has been filled with wedding imagery, along with a plantation-style house that somewhat resembles a governor’s mansion.
Valeria has also been palling around with the kinds of extremists who are attracted to Fishback’s campaign. While her Instagram account has been locked, back on March 1 she was shooting guns off with the owner of a popular far-right aesthetics account.
Whatever the merits of Fishback’s new relationship, given his history it’s a notable (and a relief) that his bride appears to be in her mid-twenties. Fishback previously faced accusations of having had a sexual relationship with an underage girl while she participated in his anti-woke high school debate program. Fishback, who later had a failed engagement with that woman when she became an adult, has never been criminally charged in that case.
ONE MORE THOUGHT on the candidate’s connubial complications: Any jewelry Fishback gives his new wife could wind up in one of his many court cases. With Fishback owing his former hedge fund employer enormous debts related to various unsuccessful schemes he tried to pull, his creditors have been zeroing in on whatever assets—like cars and jewelry—that he may have left. That includes a Cartier watch he wore to a deposition in one of the cases, which corresponds to a watch-sized purchase in his credit card history at a Cartier dealer. Asked about the watch’s whereabouts, Fishback insisted in a recent court filing that he was just borrowing the watch from a friend.
Raine didn’t respond to a request for comment about Fishback, and she hasn’t yet followed through on her repeated threats to reveal some secret about him. But watching from the sidelines as anti-Fishback accounts on X circulated the video of the candidate nudging his new bride to step aside and hush up, Raine got in one more jab.
“Dude I am so glad that is not me,” she wrote.
Someday, Will, I think colleges will have a course just on your work! 😄 Please hold on to all the artifacts (!) of these absolutely mind-boggling corners of the far-right political fever-swamp you routinely wade into! For you are a better man than any of us, as the poet said.
How do these sad, pathetic little people come into being? I’ve a hard time believing they’re for real. I sure hope they don’t procreate.