Velahor wrote:As a companion app to Gord's Jonah Prendergast application, please see my application for Senator Martha Prendergast.Character Information Sheet
NS Nation Name: Velahor
Character Name: Martha Marie Prendergast (maiden name Williamson)
Character Gender: Female
Character Age: 69
Character Height: 5’8
Character Weight: 161
Character Position/Role/Job: United States Senator from West Virginia and First Lady of West Virginia
Work History:
Staff Attorney for the not-Falwell family (2003-2020)
In-House Counsel at University of West Virginia (1994-2003)
Stay-At-Home Mother (1986-1994)
Corporate Attorney at Bowles-Rice, Morgantown, West Virginia (1974-1986)
Appearance:(Image)
Character State of Origin: Georgia
Character State of Residence: West Virginia & Virginia
Character Party Affiliation: Republican
Main Strengths:
-Wealthy through marriage, but also independently wealthy through legal career and inheritance
-Deep connections: Her husband, Jonah, is Governor of West Virginia. Her father was chairman of the Federalist Society and a Georgia State Supreme Court judge. She also was the personal attorney for the not-Falwell family for numerous years.
-She is highly competent as a debater and can be quite persuasive. She is also very good at understanding how law and legislation works. Finally, she is quite strategic. All of these speak to her decades of legal experience.
-A nearly 40-year marriage to Jonah Prendergast has developed both of their characters in ways that their respective strengths often compensate for the other’s weaknesses. The media has depicted them as a political “power couple,” the GOP’s answer to the Cliffords.
Main Weaknesses:
-Zealously tied to the moral majority/war on drugs/evangelical sector of the conservative movement, in contrast to her husband’s economic-minded approach. However, she tapered that message back a bit in order to get elected to Senate.
-Recent tragic death of grandson has left her grief-stricken and in existential crisis.
-While an exceptional mother and adoring wife, she struggles to maintain stability in other relationships due to her personality. This is because she is passive-aggressively elitist, judgmental, and competitive, especially toward other women.
-Much more tactically intelligent than book smart. Very much a one-track-mind who is smart at her job but less intelligent in other aspects like math or science. She also often delegates her most difficult duties to aides, clerks, other Senators, family members, and basically anyone else who will do it for her.
-Not spectacularly charismatic or flashy, very straighforward.
Biography: Martha Marie Williamson was born in 1952, in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Her father was a wealthy, successful lawyer in the Atlanta area and her mother was a stay-at-home mother of 6 children. They were both devout Baptists, and raised their children as such. Martha was the oldest of the 6, and took on a leader role in their household from a young age.
She was very successful in school and went to Vanderbilt Law School, just like her father did. But she did poorly in her first year of law school, and spent most of the rest of law school trying, and failing to improve her GPA. She still managed graduate, but near the bottom of her class.
After graduation, she couldn’t find any jobs in the Atlanta area. In fact, she only received one job offer after applying for more than 30 at a job fair, an associate position at Bowles-Rice, a mid-level firm in Morgantown, West Virginia. Too proud to ask her father to help get her in a job in Atlanta, she accepted the job and moved to West Virginia all on her own at 25 years old.
Stuck out of her element, away from her status as Southern aristocracy and the social obligations it came with, Martha honed in on her work. The young girl, who had been average at best in the law school classroom, began to excel as an associate attorney focused on a broad spectrum of corporate legal concerns. She was especially noted for her work on environmental, property, and labor law disputes. Additionally, the big-fish-in-small-pond factor of her highly-ranked Vanderbilt education, compared to her colleagues’ education at lowly-ranked WVU Law School, gave her some prestige in West Virginia that may not have been present elsewhere. She built a reputation as a scrappy fighter in the courtroom, while simultaneously earning the respect of judges who appreciated her thorough yet simple arguing style.
While she was at Bowles-Rice in 1974, she met Jonah Prendergast, the CFO of a large coal company his family owned. She was the opposing counsel questioning him in a deposition, and while they were on opposite sides, the chemistry was undeniable. Soon after, the suit was settled out-of-court, and Jonah soon asked her out.
They dated for about a year and soon married. They made the choice to focus on their careers and wait for children until she was in her thirties. During this time, she made partner at her firm, and was making a significantly large income (about $200k/year). Her relationship with Jonah was ultimately beneficial to her success; it became easy to draw in some of the biggest clients in the state by tapping into her husband’s strongly-established in-state business relationships.
In 1986, she had the first Prendergast child, Noah. In 1988 came one more, Jonah III. She lived at home with the children until they were old enough to be in school, then she returned to work, this time as in-house counsel for University of West Virginia in 1994. She worked in that position for 9 years, defending the university in civil litigation.
But in 2003, she began to grow tired of the public university system and its progressive nature, so she applied for a in-house counsel position at Liberty University, a school she had connections with through her Baptist family. She interviewed for the position, but another candidate was chosen.
But that didn’t mean the not-Falwells didn’t like her. They instead saw another purpose for her given her talent and tenaciousness. Thus, she was offered a job as the (not-Falwell) family’s personal lawyer. No stranger to legal battles, the (not-Falwells) counted themselves lucky to have such a zealous Christian and such a ruthless corporate lawyer on their side.
In 2016, she became the First Lady of West Virginia when her husband Jonah was elected Governor of West Virginia. She re-established West Virginia as her primary residence, selling the family’s second home in Lynchburg, Virginia and instead only maintaining a small condo there for work purposes. In early 2019, her father Joseph Williamson passed away.
In early 2020, Martha fully resigned from her position as attorney for the not-Falwell family, having scaled back her duties over the years since Jonah’s election. Part of her reason for leaving was also because of the scandal involving not-Falwell Jr. which became public in August 2020.
Soon after leaving that position, in the midst of her husband’s candidacy for President, news came out that not-Shelley Moore Capito was declining to run for re-election. After much deliberation with Jonah, it was decided that Martha would run for Senate. Life on two campaigns was hectic for the Prendergasts, but Martha loved every minute of it. Her strategic mind, combined with the in-state political machine developed by her husband, began to help both of their momentum surge.
But tragedy struck the Prendergasts when their grandson Adam was injured, and eventually died, due to an accident at one of the Triple C mines. The dual campaigns had previously been an all-hands-on-deck effort for the whole family, and the grieving brought them both to a halt.
When things felt right, the couple discussed their strategy and options. Jonah decided to step down from the Presidential race to focus on himself. Martha suspended her campaign for several weeks, but restarted operations and managed to win the primary against a weakened field.
But the general election would prove more difficult. Martha lost ground early on as her grief caused her campaign schedule to slow. In September, she turned things around with a big fundraiser that brought in a lot from some of her connections from her days as counsel for WVU. That money allowed her to focus on television ads, which boosted her polling and improved her spirits.
She began campaigning heavily in coal-mining towns, leaning on economic rhetoric like that of her husband rather than the socially-conservative kind of campaigning she practiced in the primary. By late October, she’d turned what had at one point been an 8% polling deficit to a 3% lead.
But the Election Day victory was unprecedented. On Fox News in the days leading up to the election, not-Tucker Carlson depicted Martha’s campaign favorably, as one of triumph over grief. That narrative turned out Republicans statewide at a high level, as they made it a mission to support the First Lady of their popular Governor. She ended up winning by a margin of 6%, with exit polls at one point showing a margin of around 11% as she did especially well with in-person voters.
Other Info:
Martha’s father Joseph Williamson was chairman of the Federalist Society, and was a prominent former corporate attorney and then Georgia State Supreme Court judge until his recent passing.
Martha has never drank, smoked, or done drugs.
Martha often competes in women’s amateur golf competitions, and in the 1980s competed in the US Women’s Amateur 4 times and the British Women’s Amateur twice. Her father taught her how to golf, because his only son was unable to.
Martha’s younger brother Charles was paralyzed from a polio infection in the mid-1950s.
I have read and accept the rules of the roleplay: Velahor
Do Not Remove: 84721
Looks great, will defer to a second admin opinion.
