Las Vegas – Jeff Carter, a little-known candidate for Nevada State Treasurer, launched a disturbing and deeply personal social-media attack against Sarah Johnson, the wife of Republican front-runner Drew Johnson. Carter mocked Sarah’s infertility, belittled her public service, and attempted to erase her leading role in protecting women’s sports in Nevada.
After Drew Johnson publicly expressed pride in his wife’s widely recognized work in defending Nevada’s female athletes, Carter lashed out online, declaring that Sarah and Drew “don’t have children” and therefore have no right to speak on women’s sports—using infertility as a political weapon.
“Like countless women in Nevada, I cannot have children. That reality alone has been exceptionally painful,” Sarah Johnson said. “But to see that turned into a cheap political attack is disgusting, demeaning, and completely disqualifying.”
“A man telling me I don’t qualify to speak because I don’t have children perfectly sums up this fight to keep men out of women’s sports,” said Sarah, a former varsity athlete. “I earned my place on the field—and I don’t need his permission to defend fairness. Men don’t get to decide when women’s voices count.”
Carter didn’t stop there. The recent Chicago transplant and part-time Minnesota resident who lost millions in his career as a failed Chicago Mercantile Exchange trader absurdly claimed that Sarah tried “to put herself at the center” of protecting women’s sports “when [she] isn’t a part of it at all,” even though she is widely recognized as the architect and a driving force behind “one of the biggest policy wins for Nevada conservatives in the past decade.”
Acting in a voluntary capacity, Sarah Johnson originated the concept for a statewide task force to protect women’s sports, recruited its leadership, and built the framework that was later adopted by Lieutenant Governor Stavros Anthony as the “Lieutenant Governor’s Task Force to Protect Women’s Sports.” As a result of that effort—championed by Anthony and led by Johnson—the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association prohibited biological males from competing in girls’ high-school sports.
At the same time, Sarah Johnson, a small business owner who earned her master’s degree from Vanderbilt University and previously worked at the National Federation of Independent Business, served as Director of the Nevada Office of Small Business Advocacy. In that role, she led efforts to reduce state and local licensing and regulatory burdens on entrepreneurs, earning widespread praise from small-business owners across Nevada.
Democratic legislators later defunded the office in political retaliation against Anthony and Johnson for their work defending women’s sports, costing Sarah Johnson and two other women their jobs.
Rather than condemning the retaliation against her, Carter sneered that Sarah was “claiming victimhood” and mocked her for losing her career for standing up for fairness and opportunity for girls. He dismissed her as “simply a staffer, not a leader”—a line that didn’t just belittle Sarah’s role as the director of a state agency, but revealed exactly how little he would value the more than 40 professionals who work in the Nevada Treasurer’s Office.
“My wife is widely admired throughout Nevada for her courage and leadership in protecting women’s sports and for her tireless work helping small business owners deal with the state’s maze of regulations,” Drew Johnson said. “Jeff Carter has done nothing for our state except attack a respected female leader and weaponize a woman’s infertility for political gain.”
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