Wife of White House Operative Demands George Will's Firing

The spouse of a White House official is calling for the Washington Post to fire conservative columnist George Will following a column he wrote about the Obama administration's policy on college sexual assaults.

Conservative columnist George Will has sparked demands for his firing after a recent column about sexual assault. (AP)

A petition from the liberal group UltraViolet demands: “Tell The Washington Post: Rape is real. No one wants to be a victim. Fire George Will.”

UltraViolet was co-founded by Nita Chaudhary, a longtime Democratic party activist and the wife of Jesse Lee, the director of progressive media and online response at the White House.

The organization says it's gathered 87,000 signatures in protest to the syndicated column published in the Post on June 6 with the headline, “Colleges become the victim of progressivism.”

“From mocking survivors to misleading the public on demands for college sexual assault reform and blaming women for violence against them-- the Post has left the realm of honest debate and entered the realm of hate-speech and dog whistles,” Chaudhary said in a statement.

Chaudhary previously served as the online communications director for the Democratic National Committee and as a former campaign director for MoveOn.org.

Before taking the White House job in 2011, Lee also worked for online communications at the DNC, served as senior new media adviser for then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Top White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett helped Lee propose to Chaudhary at a state dinner, the Weekly Standard reported.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden had spoken about the increasing number of rape at college campuses.

In his column, Will questioned the administration's statistics on the matter.

“Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of 'sexual assault' victims. It vows to excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults,” Will wrote.

“The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from,” Will's column continued. “The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20 percent.”

(H/T: Weekly Standard)