From the Commercial Appeal:
Tennessee Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen caught flak in the blogosphere this week for his mistakenly public tweets of endearment to a Texas college student half his age as the president’s State of the Union address was ending Tuesday night.
Though Cohen, 63 and a bachelor, didn’t own up at first to who she was when the tweets became public, he said Thursday night she is a daughter he didn’t know he had until three years ago.
The 24-year-old Texas college student and swimsuit model is Victoria Elizabeth Brink, who used her Twitter account to write that she was watching Cohen on television in the House of Representatives chamber. The two exchanged tweets during and after the Sate of the Union address.
Brink, a student at Texas State University, is also the daughter of a Texas criminal defense lawyer, Cynthia White Sinatra, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2006 against Libertarian Ron Paul, who was a candidate for president last year.
Cohen declined to describe the affair with Sinatra, saying only, “her mother and I have been friends for a long time.” There had been a hiatus, “but we renewed our friendship when I found out she was the mother of my child.”
According to her law firm web page, Sinatra, 60, is a criminal defense lawyer who was married to Frank Sinatra, Jr., the son of the famous “Old Blue Eyes.” She has represented criminal defendants before the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, including Dragan Jokic, a Bosnia Serb accused of genocide, murder and torture in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.