FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 12, 2026

Press Contact:

Vincent Errichetti

(617) 922-1824

Press@johndeatonforsenate.com

BOSTON – Republican U.S. Senate candidate John Deaton today highlighted his personal experience with childhood hunger during a Project Bread candidate forum on food insecurity, while incumbent Sen. Ed Markey, who said he would attend, canceled at the last minute to attend an event with Congresswoman Pressley.

“There’s no candidate running from office today that probably has experienced food insecurity to the level that I have,” Deaton said in his opening remarks.

“Between the ages of 9 and 11, I was raped for two years by a child predator. You would think that’s my worst childhood memory, but it’s not. As awful as it was, and is now, my worst childhood memory is listening to my mother cry herself to sleep on the nights that we didn’t have food and she didn’t know where the food was going to come from. There were 48 million Americans last night with food insecurity, 14 million of them are children. I was one of those children.”

On the issue of SNAP and fraud, Deaton stated, “There’s nothing wrong with requiring people to work, but you can’t just make it a paper thing. You can’t make guidelines that then are cut off because they don’t meet some paper guidelines.”

“Here in Massachusetts, they have the highest in New England SNAP error rate at 14%. That’s not real intentional fraud, but there is fraud taking place,” he continued. “And while people like the (Trump) administration say, ‘We’ve got to clean up the fraud,’ well, we got the state government that won’t do an audit like the 72% of the voters said. So how is Washington, whether it’s Seth or myself or Joe going to D.C., how do you get money to a state that won’t even comply with the audit?”

Deaton added, "United States senators are elected to confront problems, not shy away from them for political gain. I was deeply disappointed to learn minutes before the forum that Senator Markey would not be attending after he had promised these dedicated organizers he would be there, even though he appeared in Boston earlier today. Afterward I learned his absence was just the latest in a string of last-minute cancellations by the senator this election. Voters do not deserve the absence and arrogance Senator Markey continues to demonstrate with these disappearing acts."

Deaton participated in the forum alongside Congressman Seth Moulton and socialist candidate Joe Tache. Markey, who had originally committed to attend, instead joined a separate event.

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