Yahoo Finance Army Fires Lt. Colonel Whose Secret Life Was Exposed by Women
The Army has relieved a lieutenant colonel of his command after multiple women alleged that he had carried on affairs with them and lied about his deployments in order to keep them secret—but he hasn’t been drummed out of the military.
Richard Kane Mansir’s double life was exposed by his girlfriends earlier this year, sparking an investigation by the Army, which said it had removed him from his supervisory post at Fort Eustis in Virginia based on “substantiated findings.”
Army spokesperson Maj. Randy Ready told The Daily Beast that Mansir has not been discharged from the service and is now assigned to a different unit at Fort Eustis. He said that the Army had taken additional, administrative actions, but could not comment on what those were. The firing was first reported by Task & Purpose.
Before the discipline, two of Mansir’s girlfriends told The Daily Beast about a web of lies that he had spun to convince them they were in a committed relationship with a single man who was not always available because he was on active combat duty. In reality, Mansir had been married for almost two decades and had not been deployed overseas since 2014.
How Three Women Exposed an Army Lt. Colonel’s Crazy Secret Life
One of these women, Chelsea Curnutt, said Friday that removing Mansir from command was “not enough,” and that he should be dishonorably discharged.
“I'm not saying that just in regard to what he did to me, I'm saying it in regard to everything he’s done to other people over his career,” Curnutt told The Daily Beast. “I don’t think he deserves to be honorably discharged like the rest of the men and women in service who have honorably worn the uniform.”
Curnutt has tried multiple avenues to seek justice from the military, including bringing her allegations to the inspector general's office at Fort Eustis, where Mansir last served. In a Sept. 17 letter Curnutt provided to The Daily Beast, the inspector general said she had referred the complaints to Mansir's command for investigation and would take “no further action pertaining to these allegations.”
Curnutt claims she dated Mansir for more than a year and a half before their relationship ended in June, when he disappeared days before she was due to give birth to their child. She says she had no idea he was still married until that day.
Another woman told The Daily Beast she was engaged to Mansir in 2017, while his wife was pregnant with their third child. She said the lies he told included the death of a child, a string of military honors, and several deployments.
When they had to postpone their Las Vegas marriage because of a supposed deployment, the woman said, he provided her with papers that appear to be fake.
“He’s got this playbook,” she said. “He tells these lies about his dead children, about his PTSD, his deployments, and all the horrible things he’s had to do. He creates all these imaginary traumas to cloak his lies in.”
Mansir did not respond to the women’s allegations at the time and efforts to reach him on Friday were not successful.
According to military records, Mansir was a civil affairs officer who conducted “Army support activity” at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia. He served in the Rangers and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011 and 2012.
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