The Republican Party nominee for Michigan secretary of state, who has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, several years ago threatened to kill herself and her two daughters in response to her husband’s request for a divorce, her now-ex-husband alleged in a court filing published Friday.
The allegations against Kristina Karamo, which she denied in a statement late Friday afternoon, came to light two months before the election for secretary of state, the top election official of Michigan.
Michigan is one of several states that Trump falsely claims he lost due to widespread ballot fraud in the 2020 presidential election against President Joe Biden. Karamo has backed those claims.
Trump, when he endorsed Karamo, said, “Good luck Kristina, and while you’re at it, check out the fake election results that took place in the city of Detroit.”
Her ex-husband Adom Karamo made the explosive allegations about her in a Michigan family court filing last October as he asked the court to award him 75 days of overnight stays with their daughters at his home in Florida during their breaks from school. The filing was first obtained and published by the online site Jezebel.com.
Kristina on one occasion said, “F— it, I’ll kill us all,” as she tried to grab the steering wheel and “crash” a car driven by her husband, and carrying their two teenagers, Adom wrote in the filing.
In his motion last fall, Adom Karamo also alleged that Kristina, who is a community college professor, was “committed to an institution for evaluation due to her efforts at self-harm and suicide.”
“Father was in fact trapped in the marriage for years, always subject to the threat of Mother committing suicide,” he wrote.
Adom wrote that he did not believe at the time of the motion that Kristina “is currently in this state of mind, as this was several years ago.”
“| do believe, however, that her children have been the only thing that has kept her sane,” he added in the filing.
In her statement Friday, Kristina said, “I have never harmed my children, any claims that I have are categorically false.”
“My ex-husband, making false allegations in 2021 on social media and in court documents, was an attempt to exploit the fact that I am a public figure, using it as leverage to change the custody agreement he became dissatisfied with,” Kristina wrote.
She also said that “media entities and my opponents are desperate, so they want to push false allegations with ZERO evidence.”
“I love my children; I have forgiven my ex-husband and I look forward to serving the citizens of Michigan,” she wrote.
Kristina was formally nominated as the GOP’s candidate for secretary of state on Saturday. She faces the Democratic incumbent Jocelyn Benson in the general election.
Kristina Karamo’s lawyer Dennis Zamplas, who denied the allegations in a court filing last fall, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Michigan Republican Party declined to comment. CNBC was unable to contact Adom Karamo by phone.
Zamplas, in a response to Adom’s motion in October, called the allegations about Kristina threatening to harm their family “false.”
Zamplas also wrote that Adom “went on social media” last year, when Kristina was an announced candidate for office, “to publicize these false allegations.”
Adom then texted Kristina “to threaten her that if his parenting time demands were not met, he was going to take an interview with a news station to further publicize these false allegations,” the lawyer wrote.
Jezebel noted that in February, a judge granted Adom about 60 overnight stays with his daughters.
Karamo was listed as a speaker at a 2021 conference associated with QAnon, a false Internet-spread conspiracy that casts Trump as a hero waging a secret battle against powerful groups of pedophiles and Satan worshippers.
And she reportedly shared the false claim that the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, disrupting Congress’ confirmation of Biden’s victory in the national election, were “Antifa posing as Trump supporters.”