The Overarching Influence of Rebekah Mason

Rebekah Caldwell Mason is a former local news anchor, who worked in a number of smaller markets across Alabama. Eventually, she left TV to raise her children. Her husband was a meteorologist. Like so many American families, in the summer of 2010, an article in GQ says the Mason’s experienced some financial difficulties, but a call to their church resulted in Rebekah being hired onto the communications team of Robert Bentley’s gubernatorial campaign.

After he was elected Governor, Bentley Rebekah Mason the job as his communications director, and appointed her husband to head up faith-based initiatives. Beginning February 2011, Rebekah was paid “approximately $98,000 per year, which was reduced after March 2012 to approximately $48,000 per year,” according to Special Counsel Jack Sharman’s report to the House Judiciary Committee, released April 7, 2017.

The report further notes that Mason served in that role July 2013, leaving to run communications for Bentley’s re-election campaign. It was apparently during this tenure that Mason’s influence moved from the periphery to the heart of the Bentley’s inner circle. As Sharman’s House Judiciary Committee findings say, “In July 2013, Mason left formal employment with the Office of the Governor to begin work on Governor Bentley’s re-election campaign although she was at the Capitol in Governor Bentley’s office on a regular basis, having maintained a parking space and keycard access.”

As a GQ article by Jason Zengerle reports, Mason thought the Governor was being ill-served by his other advisers. Despite high approval ratings, sources told Zengerle that Mason believed Bentley left too much on the table in his first term and she convinced him he needed to be more active in his second.

The notion of Mason gaining influence during the reelection campaign and at the outset of his second term is supported by Sharman’s House Judiciary Committee report, which reads:

It is clear from several Bentley affiliates we interviewed that plans were made in late 2014 for Mason to return to the Bentley Administration in the second term. In November or December 2014, Governor Bentley presented Blake Hardwich with a handwritten job description of roles and responsibilities for Mason. In the typed version, the job title is “Senior Political Advisor” with the assigned “mission” “to advise the Governor on a wide range of issues” and to “provide the Governor with the most effective options for decision-making.”

As the GQ article puts it:

“He didn’t have a voice,” one friend of Mason’s told me, “until she helped him find it.” Zengerle continues, “When she became his top political adviser, it was like the Hindenburg came down and fell on the Titanic as the Titanic hit the iceberg,” one person who was once close to Bentley told me. “I was watching a woman who didn’t know how a bill becomes a law running the state of Alabama.”