He bullied teachers when he was governor. He bullied political foes. He bullied reporters.
He even bullied former first lady Jane Beshear when he tossed her off the Kentucky Horse Park board and stripped her name from the Capitol campus education center for which she raised money to build.
He was mean and holier-than-thou.
So, it was shocking, but somehow not surprising when The Times of London reported recently that Bevin had abandoned one of his sons at a Jamaican behavior modification program where children were allegedly abused.
After the Jamaican government raided the school for troubled teens and shut it down -- and then tried to return the children who were kept there to their parents, Bevin didn't show up at the court hearing to claim the 17-year-old identified in the story by the fictitious name "Noah."
He just left him there. He abandoned the kid 1,500 miles away from his home.
Noah was one of the four children Bevin adopted from Ethiopia in 2012 -- the year before he launched his failed bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell.
When he ran for governor in 2015, Bevin said one of the reasons he was running was because state social workers had refused to allow him and his wife to adopt a daughter, and he wanted to revamp the state's adoption and foster care programs.
The Bevins said the state denied their request because they already had five children at home.
The Times wrote that the Atlantis Leadership Academy kept children in horrific conditions.
According to the Times, children imprisoned there "wrote that they had been starved, waterboarded and brutally beaten with broom handles, rakes, belts and metal water bottles. They said they had been sleep-deprived and relentlessly insulted.
"Boys who self-harmed reported having bleach and salt rubbed in their wounds; others wrote that they were threatened with knives and kept in solitary confinement for months on end."
The Times reported that children said there was other abuse: a child beaten unconscious, another who suffered a broken nose and yet another with a dislocated shoulder. They said the staff members would drink themselves drunk and force the boys to fight for their entertainment, and they'd threaten to kill the kids.
This is the setting where Bevin left his son and allegedly refused to go get him after the allegations were made.
Randall Cook, the head of the school, claimed in an email to the Courier Journal that the Times had defamed the school and had written the story simply to capitalize on the attention influencer Paris Hilton had brought in her campaign against this type of reform school.
"This story has nothing to do with the Bevins Family, they are the victims in Paris Hiltons et al agenda, interfering and canceling as much as anyone else," Cook wrote.
The Times didn't say how it confirmed that Bevin was the father of the teenager, but Cook's statement seemed to confirm it, as did Glenna Bevin's divorce papers, which said she had only one minor child -- presumably "Noah's" younger brother -- living with her.
The Times is a credible newspaper so I'm likely to believe them more than I'm likely to believe the guy who ran the school Jamaican authorities shut down. But even if Cook is telling the truth, it still doesn't excuse Bevin.
He's got a son stashed at a foreign boarding school, and when he's told the school has been shut down for abusing kids ... he does nothing.
Must have thought the kid needed "some skin in the game" -- the phrase Bevin also used to explain why he wanted to charge fees or strip health care benefits from people who didn't have jobs.
If the stories are true, these kids not only had skin in the game, they had broken bones and blood in the game.
What's worse is Bevin's son told the Times reporter he wasn't surprised that Bevin didn't come for him, and when asked why Bevin adopted him to begin with, he said "public image."
Bevin often used his children -- both his five biological children and the four adopted children -- in campaign ads and often posted about them on social media.
Since losing reelection, Bevin rarely posts anything about his kids on X, formerly known as Twitter, except for his biological son, Isaac, who is a race car driver.
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The Lantern, an online news service in Kentucky, has reported that "Noah" is back in the states but wouldn't say where or with whom he is living.
And Bevin isn't answering questions about this -- neither he nor his lawyer has responded to questions from the Courier Journal. That's what bullies do when they're called out -- they run away and hide.
I'd love to completely blow up Bevin for this, call him "trash" and whatever other adjectives are appropriate for someone who abandons their 17-year-old son in such horrid conditions.
I'd love to mock him for the way he acted like he was superior to everyone, how he was pure of heart and Godly, and everyone else was, well, they were somehow lesser than him.
It's a tragedy for "Noah," who believes he was adopted and brought here from the other side of the world simply for his adoptive father's political needs and who was discarded when Bevin no longer needed him.
Once a jerk... : Matt Bevin lost the Kentucky governor's race because he's a jerk. Good riddance!
And for that, Bevin doesn't need to be mocked. He needs to be shunned and he needs to be investigated to determine if he violated any laws either here or in Jamaica.
At the very least, it sounds like he's guilty of negligence -- somewhere -- and for that he needs to be kept in a place like the alleged hellhole the students say the Atlantis Leadership Academy was. At least for the length of time he left "Noah" there.
He does, after all, need to have some skin in the game.
Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at [email protected].