A bigot who has bribed his children to marry white and straight and who flippantly uses the N word? That’s what brother Bill told the press…
Bill Cunningham went to our local daily last week to rat out his estranged sibling, telling the paper that his brother Vickers Cunningham, who is campaigning for a commissioner seat, is a bigot who has bribed his children to marry white and straight and who flippantly uses the N word.
Vickers Cunningham has responded; we will get to that in a minute.
Former Dallas judge Vickers Cunningham lives in East Dallas and we work in the same building. His father “Bulldog” Cunningham ran the insurance offices on the bottom floor for many years before his 2016 death.
Both father and son were advertisers in Advocate magazines, our sister publication, so the family is quite well known around here. When the Dallas Morning News reported that Cunningham, now running for for the Republican nomination for the Precinct 2 county commissioner job being vacated by Mike Cantrell, rewarded his children via unalterable legal documents, a trust, for marrying someone who is white and of the opposite sex, and that he uses the so-called N word freely, it felt more personal than your typical political scandal, and it sort of stunned those of us who interact with him here.
Especially when the news went national, showing up on Huffington Post and in the Washington Post.
When initially confronted by a Dallas Morning News reporter asking why he set the trust up that way, Cunningham says he had established certain “milestones” that would allow his children to receive payouts from the trust. Those milestones include receiving an advanced degree, running for public office and marrying someone of the opposite sex and marrying a Caucasian.
He says the marriage milestones reflect his “traditional Christian values” and don’t reflect racism or homophobia. He also says his views about marrying a Caucasian have evolved since the trust was set up in 2010.
“Today I would absolutely remove those conditions if I legally could,” he says now.
And he “categorically denies” using the N word at all.
But why would brother do such a thing? Well, Bill is married to a black man, a situation that apparently has caused family friction. Vickers cites other reasons.
In “A Personal Note From Vic Cunningham,” the former judge fires back at bro, calling Bill a “master manipulator bent on destroying my entire family,” and stating, “he has ripped our family apart.”
My brother Bill has become very estranged from the rest of the family but not because he is gay, rather because he took extreme advantage of our elderly parents and convinced them to lend him over $500,000 with no intention or ability to repay. He went back repeatedly to our mother until she had given him her last dollar, and even then he maxed out her credit card without her knowledge. His total disrespect of my parents caused them to write him out of their will. It was not until after our Dad died that we found out the magnitude of deceit. It was during this time that Bill asked me for a $250,000 loan. Apparently, I was not a racist then, but am now?
In the letter, he also denies ever using the N word.
The Dallas Morning News chose to attribute these allegations to one person, a good friend of my brother I hardly knew, and last saw in 2006. Her statement is without collaboration. I categorically deny using the ‘N-word’. I have never, and will never discriminate against anyone based upon race, religion, color, creed, or sexual orientation.
Read the whole statement here.
The election is tomorrow.
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