Mellissa Carone’s testimony before the Michigan state house panel made her an instant meme across the nation and more than earned her a parody on Saturday Night Live that was, if anything, less bizarre than her actual statements. The aspiring actress put on a one-woman show of conspiracy theories that included food trucks full of ballots and poll books that contained 100,000 fake names. It took just two days for a Wayne County judge to rule that Carone’s statements—statements that she included on a signed affidavit—were “simply not credible,” making this another chapter in the ongoing saga “Say, just what do these guys have to do before they’re charged with perjury?”
While Carone’s house testimony might have been lifted from the b-plot of bad sitcom, what she’s doing now isn’t nearly so hilarious. After sitting next to a highly infectious Rudy Giuliani for a mask-free day of testimony, Carone joined America’s major embarrassment for some post-testimony mugging for the camera. All of which came just hours before Giuliani tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Which means that Mellissa Carone was parked next to someone during their peak period of potential contagion. Naturally, she’s doing the wrong thing.
As The Washington Post reports, health officials in the county where Corone lived have ordered anyone who had had close contact with Giuliani to self-isolate and get a test for COVID-19. Carone is not cooperating and waved off the suggestion that she should get tested, or be concerned about infecting anyone else, saying, “I would take it seriously if it came from Trump, because Trump cares about American lives.” Yes. That’s exactly why the number of Americans dead from COVID-19 hit 295,000 on Wednesday. Because Trump cares so much.
As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, the Michigan house was not the first place where Carone put her acting chops on display. Giuliani’s star witness recently completed probation for another starring role in a series of sex videos which she emailed to her fiance’s ex-wife.
Unsurprisingly, when she was caught and brought in for an interview by police, Carone denied having ever sent the emails. It wasn’t until she was actually presented with the evidence that the videos were sent from her computer and her IP address that Carone confessed. Police also uncovered the little fact that after sending the videos, Carone told her fiance to get a new Wi-Fi router and change internet providers. Which would seem to be pretty good acknowledgement of guilt.
According to the AJC, a police investigator said, “Mellissa then confessed to sending the videos because she wanted to send (the ex-wife) ‘over the top.’” Instead they earned Carone a conviction and a year of probation for “disorderly conduct”—a pretty good deal considering that the original charges could have both landed her in prison and on the sex offender registry.
In response to the news coming out, Carone made a statement just as coherent as any she made during her House testimony, “But one thing that that anybody that knows me, or people that don’t even know me, cannot and will never be able to ever claim about me is that I’m a liar. I am not a liar. I’ve never been known to be a liar. I am not a liar. And I am the most honest person.”
Which pairs perfectly with the statement of the Wayne County judge, which stated that Carone “made numerous demonstrably false allegations” and was “not credible.”
Honestly, Rudy Giuliani and Mellissa Carone are right … when they say that Carone’s past actions should not be taken as an excuse to either impugn her character or deny her testimony. Unfortunately for Giuliani and Carone, the character that she demonstrated in her testimony was more than enough to show that probation was ineffective in changing her behavior.
Even more unfortunately, Carone is confirming that character by her cavalier treatment of her COVID-19 exposure and her willingness to endanger those around her.