The ad begins in a sunny kitchen. A woman in a dark blue top and a simple gold necklace pours herself a cup of coffee and speaks directly to the camera, a Bible on the table in front of her.
“I’m Yolanda Robinson,” she says in the two-minute spot released last week. “Lord knows you’ve heard a lot of things about my husband, Mark.”
It is rare to hear the voice of North Carolina’s second lady, who this week played the familiar role of a political wife defending her husband’s character in the aftermath of a public scandal. The Mark she mentions in the ad is Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who is pressing forward with his campaign for governor after CNN reported that he had posted on a pornographic website more than a decade ago disturbing comments, including one in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI.” (Mr. Robinson has denied the report.)
In a game of political trivia, most participants would find it difficult to conjure up the name of their state’s second lady. In North Carolina, however, the wife of the lieutenant governor is a little better known.
Ms. Robinson, 56, is sometimes seen by her husband’s side at campaign stops, occasionally planting a kiss on him before he speaks at rallies and events. (She has appeared on the campaign trail at least once since the CNN report.) But during Mr. Robinson’s short political career, she has also drawn attention for ventures that ran into legal trouble. One of them — a nonprofit — was shuttered this year amid an investigation that required the organization to repay $132,000 to a state agency.
“The fact that we know her name is unusual,” said Chris Cooper, a professor of political science and public affairs and the director of the Haire Institute for Public Policy at Western Carolina University. “It tells us that she has been ensnared in almost as much controversy as her husband.”
Representatives for Mr. Robinson’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Ms. Robinson declined to comment.
The couple, both North Carolina natives, met through a mutual friend shortly after Mr. Robinson dropped out of college and began working at the fast-food pizza eatery Sbarro, according to a report from New York magazine. They married in 1990 and had two children: a son, Dayson, named after Mr. Robinson’s father, and a daughter, Kimberly.
The couple struggled with money, with Mr. Robinson working in furniture manufacturing and at other odd jobs. In those early years together, the couple, then in their 30s, filed for bankruptcy three times: in 1998, 1999 and 2003. In 2012, they were evicted for not paying rent.
“His attitude was not a matter of ‘I can’t pay,’ it was a matter of ‘I don’t have to pay,’” Kermit Robinson, their former landlord, said in an interview.
Representatives for Mr. Robinson, the lieutenant governor, have acknowledged the eviction, and in an August 2023 statement to WRAL, a Raleigh news station, blamed the landlord for not going through the legal process to recover the rent the couple owed.
Ms. Robinson, who has a master’s degree in accounting from University of North Carolina-Greensboro, tried to ease the family’s financial woes. She started a day care, Precious Beginnings, in 2000, and then a nonprofit to help child care facilities receive federal funding to provide healthy meals.
In his memoir, “We Are The Majority: The Life and Passions of a Patriot,” Mr. Robinson wrote that his wife’s nonprofit, Balanced Nutrition, gave the couple the financial stability for him to enter politics. He did so after a video of his speaking in favor of gun rights at a Greensboro City Council meeting went viral in 2018. The next year, he entered the Republican primary for lieutenant governor.
“There’s a perception out there that she’s the brains of the outfit,” said Brant Clifton, the editor of The Daily Haymaker, a conservative commentary site focused on North Carolina politics. “He’s the brawn, she’s the brains.”
Early in their relationship, the young couple made a decision they could not have imagined would have national political implications more than 20 years later.
In 2022, a year into Mr. Robinson’s tenure as lieutenant governor, a social media user unearthed a decade-old Facebook comment in which Mr. Robinson wrote that he had paid for the couple to have an abortion one year before they married.
“I’m not saying abortion is wrong cause I said so it’s wrong cause God says so,” he wrote in the post. “It’s wrong when others do it and it was wrong when I paid for it to be done to my unborn child in 1989.”
The revelation roiled North Carolina politics. Mr. Robinson had maintained a staunch anti-abortion stance as an elected official and had a track record of making extreme comments about abortion, including calling the practices of Planned Parenthood “genocide.”
A column in the opinion pages of The Raleigh News & Observer referred to Mr. Robinson as a “moral fraud.”
The second lady appeared by her husband’s side to calm the backlash.
In a video posted to Mr. Robinson’s official Facebook page in March 2022, the couple appeared together, as the lieutenant governor addressed the abortion. As her husband described how the couple had made the “wrong” decision, Ms. Robinson looked at him but said nothing.
She found herself once again the subject of headlines, when in March of this year the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services opened a review of her nonprofit, Balanced Nutrition, an intermediary between federal money and child care centers seeking funding to provide low-cost meals.
Over the summer, the agency ordered Ms. Robinson, who is known professionally as Yolanda Hill, to pay the state more than $132,000, after finding that Balanced Nutrition had improperly billed the state on behalf of a child-care center that had not requested or received funding for meals.
In a letter in July, the agency also cited “serious deficiencies” in the nonprofit’s operation, including a finding that Balanced Nutrition had acted improperly in paying Ms. Robinson’s daughter without disclosing that they were related and without receiving approval from the state agency.
Ms. Robinson abruptly closed the nonprofit in the spring, citing the time commitment of her husband’s campaign. Local news media reported that the shutdown happened shortly after she was notified of the state’s investigation.
It was a bit of a repeat of the past for the couple: Before Balanced Nutrition, in 2007, Ms. Robinson sold a day care center that she owned, and that her husband helped operate, after a state investigation found that the center had presented falsified documents to inspectors.
And before that, in 2003, Girl Scouts Tarheel Triad Council, a group of Girl Scouts troops in North Carolina, sued Ms. Robinson in small claims court over a bounced check and won.
“The Girl Scouts — how do you get in trouble with the Girl Scouts?” Mr. Cooper, the Western Carolina University professor, said.
The legal troubles surrounding the Precious Beginnings and Balanced Nutrition have been the subject of attack ads from Josh Stein, the Democratic attorney general who is running against Mr. Robinson in the race for North Carolina governor. In a statement to NC Newsline over the summer, a spokesman for Mr. Robinson’s campaign accused Mr. Stein, who has gained a wide lead, of “cherry-picking a few minor violations and clerical errors to grind a political ax.”
Over the years, there have been few glimpses into Ms. Robinson’s thinking. But social media accounts offer a limited look into her world.
While much of the content on her Facebook profile is private, her likes are public. The robust list includes right-wing media outlets like Breitbart and The Daily Caller; groups linked to the National Rifle Association; local chapters of the Tea Party and a crisis pregnancy center. (She has also liked a local dinner theater, tennis organizations and Judge Judy.)
On Pinterest, a platform where users “pin” images to their own digital mood boards, an account that appears to be associated with Ms. Robinson has mostly shared cake recipes, interior design ideas and inspiration images for wedding décor.
One board labeled “ss man,” is now empty, but an archived version reviewed by The New York Times showed a single pin: an image of a German World War II soldier. The image is similar to ones a user with the handle “minisoldr” — the username associated with the comments Mr. Robinson is reported to have made on the pornographic site — submitted to a website that posts photos of military figurines.
On an X account appearing to belong to Ms. Robinson, she also posted highlights from a class she participated in at UNC-Greensboro in 2017, “Marketing for Public and Nonprofit Agencies.” Ms. Robinson posted admiringly about the social media strategy of one nonprofit organization in particular: Planned Parenthood.
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