Bloomberg adviser attacks Bernie's sex-focused alt newspaper articles

A top adviser to Mike Bloomberg unleashed a new — and salacious — line of attack against presidential primary frontrunner Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday, part of an increasingly aggressive effort to slow the Vermont independent’s rise to the top of the field.

“Bernie has all of this loopy stuff in his background, saying things like women get cancer from having too many orgasms or toddlers should run around naked and touch each other’s genitals to insulate themselves from porn,” Bloomberg senior adviser Tim O’Brien said on CNN’s “New Day,” as anchor Alisyn Camerota said, “Sorry, what? What?”

“He’s written about women’s rape fantasies, that hasn’t been surfaced,” O’Brien continued. “That's the loony side of Bernie.”

A Sanders campaign spokesman declined to comment to POLITICO.

O’Brien was drawing — sometimes inaccurately — from essays Sanders wrote in the 1960s and ’70s for the alternative newspaper The Vermont Freeman. The future senator once referenced studies purporting to link cervical cancer with sexual activity — but his concern was actually women having too few orgasms, not too many.

A 1972 essay included rape fantasies from both a man’s and a woman’s perspectives, though Sanders in 2015 disavowed it as “poorly written” fiction akin to “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

And a 1969 piece criticized restrictions on babies being naked at the beach. Sanders wrote, “Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others sexual organs, and maybe even touch them. Terrible thing! If we [raise] children up like this it will probably ruin the whole pornography business.”

The Bloomberg campaign’s move to resurrect these comments comes as the fractured field of Democratic moderates is struggling to blunt Sanders’ momentum — and to convince primary voters ahead of a debate in South Carolina on Tuesday night that the Vermont senator is a bad bet for the general election.

Also on Tuesday, Bloomberg held a South Carolina press conference where black surrogates attacked Sanders’ record. Bloomberg has released two new online ads slamming Sanders for his past votes on guns and for his supporters’ online behavior. O’Brien, after invoking the old essays, pivoted to Sanders’ record on immigration, guns and the 1994 crime bill.

But the efforts to paint Sanders as too radical for November haven’t paid off yet: Recent POLITICO/Morning Consult polling found that Democratic primary voters now see him as the most electable primary candidate.

Christopher Cadelago contributed to this report.