SOUND THE ALARM: New Reporting Highlights Marty O’Donnell’s Long Record of Disqualifying and Sexist Comments
In case you missed it, new reporting from The Nevada Current highlights how Marty O’Donnell, a former video game composer with “time on his hands” and no political background, has a long record of disqualifying comments against women and the LGTBQ+ community. O’Donnell insulted single parents, joked about sexual assaults, called LGBTQ+ individuals an “existential threat,” and joked about his past of harassing employees online and in his podcast.
O’Donnell recently said he would “absolutely, in a heartbeat” vote to authorize Trump’s costly and disastrous war in Iran. If elected to Congress, O’Donnell would be nothing but a rubber stamp of Trump’s MAGA agenda and pave a disastrous path aimed at stripping away LGBTQ+ and women’s rights.
EMILYs List endorsed Rep. Susie Lee has proven to be a tried and true fighter, working relentlessly to prioritize the needs of working-class families and deliver affordable healthcare, safer schools, and lower costs.
Read an excerpt from The Nevada Current and The Advocate below, and the full stories here. And here.
Who is Marty O’Donnell?, The Nevada Current
Dana Gentry, 8.13.26
Marty O’Donnell has taken the road less traveled to running for Congress. A Republican, O’Donnell has never held elected office. His website, which lists his many accomplishments as a composer of jingles and video game scores, details no civic involvement.
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At a campaign office opening last weekend, O’Donnell, in audio provided to the Current, said that if elected, he would “absolutely, in a heartbeat” vote to authorize President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, and said the president “needs to be able to do quick military action” because Congress is slow.
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O’Donnell’s podcast, the Marty O’Donnell Show, features interviews with guests ranging from former Superman actor and Republican activist Dean Cain to O.J. Simpson’s house guest, Kato Kaelin. None of his 29 guests are women.
In an August 2025 interview, O’Donnell introduced Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale, who he noted has been “accused of many weird — fascist, nationalist, white nationalist, misogynist, you name it — he’s been accused of everything. And of course I’m being accused of those things too, so I had to talk to him to find out what’s true and what’s not true.”
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On another episode last year, O’Donnell noted he has Swedish ancestry and attributes the good looks of some nationalities to Viking marauders, who he says were selective in their sexual assaults.
There’s “probably some truth,” he says, to the theory ”that the reason all the Swedes and the Norwegians are such good-looking people is that the Vikings came over, raided England, and only took the good-looking women back.”
“Yeah, they’re gonna take back the hottest broads they find. Yeah, that’s absolutely a thing,” responded his guest, Aaron Visconti.
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O’Donnell is an adherent to the traditional family – a husband, wife, and children, as the American ideal. Other iterations of family, he suggests, are a threat to Western culture.
“Marriage defined as a union of one man and one woman isn’t just a Christian definition,” he said on social media in 2024.
This week, O’Donnell posted the rescission of his invitation to attend a Halo reunion in California next month because LGBTQ staff did not “feel comfortable” about his attendance, citing his statements on the campaign trail.
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In a recent interview, O’Donnell cited Marxism as an “existential threat.” He noted “a weird alliance of all these groups that are, you know, like to pretend like they’re oppressed. So the LGBTQ+ people, the Islamists, the Marxists, you know, they’re all together now, acting like they’re all together on the same side.”
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In the same episode, the candidate asserted that families led by single parents can be “healed” but are not to be celebrated.
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About one-quarter of Nevada households with a child under the age of 18 are led by single parents.
“I don’t want a dentist who’s a weirdo in my community. I want a dentist who probably has a wife and a couple kids too, right? It’s like, or a husband and a couple kids,” he asserted. “Although I’ve never actually gone to a female dentist, That’s just me. I don’t know. I’m old-fashioned. I just haven’t seen one.”
O’Donnell argues diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have ruined some video games and prompted a backlash. The re-release of Halo “is in large part due to the woke-ification of the gaming industry,” he wrote on an anti-DEI website that has since been taken down. “After years of gamers fighting the infiltration of DEI in the industry, we are finally winning.”
He also complained that some games offer the option to choose transgender characters.
“It’s hard for gamers to immerse themselves in a game when they are required to choose a ‘body type’ instead of gender and provide pronouns for their character at the start,” he complained on the same website.
In October 2017, when the #MeToo movement went viral and survivors of sexual harassment and assault emerged as a force in the political and corporate worlds, O’Donnell asked “Did Twitter do something to women that I missed? #soconfused”
O’Donnell’s former co-workers at Bungie have called him “the most right-leaning employee at the company.”
“Well, Bungie made better games when it was a ‘boys club’,” O’Donnell said on the Marty Army Discord platform in 2024 of the news that a former colleague had been fired for sexual harassment. “I still remember trying to erase the artists’ white boards before women came to visit. I’ll never understand how Lorraine tolerated it.”
‘Lorraine’ is O’Donnell’s former Bungie colleague, artist Lorraine McLees.
In social media posts from 2024 that have since been removed, but were preserved in screenshots on another account, McLees recalled an office Halloween party in 1999.
O’Donnell, disguised in a Telly Savalas mask , trench coat, and leather gloves, approached McLees who was cutting a piece of cake. McLees says when the unidentified figure got too close, she wielded the knife in his direction and told him to back off.
O’Donnell countered on social media that he “NEVER touched anyone. The Bungie Halloween party story is hilarious,” he said. “Yes, the women got really creeped out but I made sure to never touch anyone, just loom.”
According to McLees, the next day at work the women recalled their encounters with the masked O’Donnell, who, she noted, put roses on their desks and apologized.
“But that moment when I put up the knife was still a bad time. It wasn’t ok. I forgave Marty afterwards,” McLees wrote in 2024. “The ‘boys club’ mentality was laughable in how awful it was, because by this time I thought we were past that. But where are we now?”
Bungie employees, she added, ”laughed about it what, 11 years ago? Same way we laugh about inappropriate pranks we did as kids—but it is no longer funny when we demonstrably do not grow tf up and learn from it.
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Trump-backed game composer says LGBTQ+ people are ‘existential threat’ to Western civilization, The Advocate
Christopher Wiggins, 7.17.26
Marty O’Donnell, the Trump-backed Republican nominee in a competitive congressional race, has described LGBTQ+ people as part of an alliance pushing Western civilization toward an “abyss.”
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“Talk about an existential, existential threat,” O’Donnell said. “We are on the cliff looking down into the abyss. And the abyss is Marxism, its anti-Western philosophy.”
He then grouped LGBTQ+ people with Islamists and Marxists, accusing them of pretending to be oppressed. “There is a weird alliance of all these groups,” he said. “So the LGBTQ+ people, the Islamists, the Marxists, you know, they’re all together now.”
The comments are part of a broader record in which O’Donnell has portrayed LGBTQ+ equality as a threat to Christianity and Western culture, opposed marriage equality and disparaged transgender identities.
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During the same interview, O’Donnell invoked Christian doctrine to condemn Pride. “Pride is one of the seven deadly sins,” he said. “It’s always cracked me up that pride is the big banner for the woke.” O’Donnell added, “I’m all for bringing back shame.”
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“So, yes, it turns out that gay men have the largest number of sex partners over lives,” he said. O’Donnell said he then told the program, “Gay men are the most promiscuous,” and objected when it warned that the word carried a value judgment.
“But I mean, are we going to lose the words like sin, promiscuity, adultery?” he said. The June comments echo statements O’Donnell has made on his podcast, on social media, and on a campaign-affiliated Discord server.
In a June 2025 episode of The Marty O’Donnell Show, he hosted Ryan Helfenbein, a Liberty University executive who repeated the anti-LGBTQ+ trope that queer people recruit children. “One thing you need to understand about the LGBT movement is they don’t reproduce. They recruit,” Helfenbein said.
“Right,” O’Donnell responded.
“And they’re going to take your children from you,” Helfenbein continued.
In an April 2025 podcast, O’Donnell said LGBTQ+ people had “co-opted” the rainbow, which he described as a symbol of God’s promise. “We have to figure out a way to take those things back,” he said. “Those people don’t get to own that stuff.”
“It is an us-versus-them thing,” he added.
A compilation of O’Donnell’s statements reviewed by The Advocate also documents his opposition to marriage equality, criticism of transgender people and attacks on gender-affirming care.
In 2024, O’Donnell wrote on X that marriage defined as “a union of one man and one woman isn’t just a Christian definition.” Same-sex marriages have been legal nationwide since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.
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