Mary Peltola’s campaign on Thursday downplayed a report that the Democratic nominee in Alaska’s pivotal Senate race shoved a staffer and used slurs, saying the article exaggerated her behavior, but acknowledging she struggled following the deaths of her husband and mother.

The New York Times article published on Wednesday is based on text messages and interviews with nine former employees of Peltola, who served in the House of Representatives from 2022 till the beginning of last year and is now set to face Republican senator Dan Sullivan in the 3 November midterm elections.

In a statement, Harry Child, a spokesperson for Peltola’s campaign, said her behavior was affected by the stress of working in the House together with the death of her husband in a 2023 plane crash as well as her mother around the same time.

“At the time of their passing, Mary was parenting kids through their own grief, serving full-time in the US House of Representatives thousands of miles from home, and running a competitive re-election campaign – all while shouldering the enormous burden of grief,” Child said.

“Like any person who has gone through multiple personal tragedies in the span of a few months, Mary sometimes struggled to deal with her grief. But she treats her staff with respect and care, and she maintains close positive relationships with her staff spanning her nearly 30 years in public service.”

He added that “exaggerating and outright lying about moments from the hardest period of her life, and falsely presenting them as a pattern of behavior, is wrong”.

The contest between the two-term senator Sullivan, and Peltola, who lost re-election to the House in 2024, is seen as crucial to Democrats’s hopes of retaking the Senate in the midterms. Democrats must win at least four seats to gain a majority in the chamber, and have named Alaska as a top priority, in addition to Maine, North Carolina and Ohio.

Sullivan called the behavior reported by the Times “sad” and “disturbing”.

“Young Alaskans went through a lot of abuse and I’m sure there’s a hell of a lot more than was just reported in that story,” he told reporters at the US Capitol.

Other former aides to Peltola who spoke to the Times stood by her conduct.

“Mary Peltola is one of the finest human beings that I’ve ever worked for,” said Paul Horner, Peltola’s finance director in 2022, when she won both a special election to represent Alaska in the House and then a general election that year.

Tyson Fick, a special assistant who had advised Peltola on fishing policy during her time in the House, called her “awesome and demanding”, but acknowledged she occasionally “raised her voice”.

He said Peltola was dealing with grief during her time in Congress, and noted since she had previously worked on a commercial fishing boat, staffers who are not familiar with how people act in environments like that may have been misinterpreting her demeanor, the Times reported.