Here is the GQ article on Levi Johnston.

There is a lot in the article about hunting and Levi's homophobic tendencies. (Not uncommon in men his age in Alaska, especially if they come from the Valley.)

It also contains the now famous quote about Todd offering Bristol a car if she would dump Levi, however it is not explained at what stage of their relationship this offer was made.

Tank Jones gets quite an interesting write up as well, though it seems the writer focuses more on Tank's impressive physique rather than his good humor and penchant for expletives and double talk. (When I first met Tank there was a lot of verbal jousting and puffing out of chests until we both realized that neither one of us was very intimidating to the other, and after that our communications have been very relaxed and quite pleasant. Tank is only one of the sources I have been working, but he is also the toughest and refuses to give me anything until he gets Levi a good deal.)

Here are a few notable quotes from the article:

......You can feel the Palins. From my budget hotel on Lake Lucille, I can see the big wooden wall that surrounds their house, and a roof beyond it. They are of this place, they belong here, but their power has disturbed an equilibrium. At the gun shop, where the owners have known the family forever, the men at the counter say they believe deep down that when she puts her head on her pillow at night, she wishes she had never said yes to McCain. (Personally I believe that when Sarah Palin finally puts her head down on her pillow at night she just hopes that she can keep a lid on the lies for another day and that soon she will be able to get the hell out of Wasilla and move on with her life.)

.....Levi’s unemployed. That makes helping take care of his son, Tripp, tricky. He has been on The Tyra Banks Show, where he met Nick Lachey, but he has very little money. Sarah Palin’s father has called him a deadbeat dad in the paper. Levi then responded, saying he’s tried to get a job but his notoriety makes it impossible. No crew boss wants paparazzi following his men around, I suppose. And they are mainly Palin people around here. Levi’s known to be on the outs. (I doubted this at first, and even had a job lined up for Levi, but that was before I saw the media frenzy that surrounds Levi these days.)


......The previous year he’d (Levi) been in a homeschool scenario. Alaska boasts the most lax homeschooling rules of any state in the union, in the sense that they have literally almost no rules. Levi was doing his learning online, through a Brigham Young University program. Unsupervised, at the Palins’ house, where Bristol Palin was homeschooling, too.
(This HAD to have been during the 2007-2008 school year. If you ask yourself WHY the Governor would have left her teenage daughter and her boyfriend alone and unsupervised to "study" for almost a year, I think the reason becomes fairly obvious.)

“May I ask if that’s how Tripp came into the world?”

He did not kiss and tell. He did however shrug and smile.

......Levi wanted to text Bristol. Tank thought he should. Of course I said he should, spreading vulturous wings. “Screw it,” he said. “I’m doing it.” He texted her while Tank and I watched over his shoulder. “You looked great on TV,” he typed with his thumbs. A few blocks on she texted back, “Thanks. You too! I tried to call you on your birthday.” They went back and forth some more. Tank and I gave them their privacy.
(According to one member of his family Bristol is just playing with Levi's emotions but that Levi still has genuine feelings for Bristol.)


.....In Alaska you heard two competing takes on the Bristol-Levi affair. One was the “under the bus” narrative, held to by the Levi camp. In this story, Levi loves a girl, she gets pregnant, he gives up high school and hockey so he can provide for her and the baby. When it suits their political purposes, the family embraces him and essentially puts him forward as a son-in-law. When his meager political value is spent, they do what most normal parents would do and discourage the daughter from marrying him, in hopes that she can get back on with her future. He’s frozen out of the family. They won’t let him see the baby except for a few hours at a time. They won’t let the baby sleep at his house. His visits at the Palins’ are awkward. He can’t bond with the baby. He’d said to me,

Just going over there makes me pretty damn uncomfortable. I would call and say, “Can I pick him up?” It was, “No, you can’t have him, but you can come see him.” Just going over there, and Todd and Sarah sitting there staring at me, doesn’t do it for me. Todd never says anything, really. Sarah, I don’t know. She’s a politician. She knows how to throw in a fake smile and look happy. They’re pretty good at that.
(Now this sounds EXACTLY like the Sarah Palin that I have come to know.)


.....“Did she dump you, or did you dump her?”

He gives me the thing about how it was mutual. “Mutual” means nothing. Levi, whathappened?

I would have to say, like, right when we got back from the [Republican] convention, things got crazy. When the convention was going on, I think it was probably like… I think that’s when we all felt the most comfortable together. We spent a lot of time together down there. It was going great. Then we came back. And when it really hit the fan, I think, is when Sarah lost, and they came back and everything was just kind of…just getting weird.
(There are a lot of clues contained in this sentence. This completely flies in the face of the warm and fuzzy picture that Sarah and Bristol were painting of her relationship with Levi and how they cared for the (newborn?) baby Tripp together.)


....Did you get the sense that her parents were pressuring her?

I know that her parents didn’t want us together. I really don’t think they did. So they probably put a little pressure on her. But at the same time, they told us they wanted us to get married when they found out Bristol was pregnant. Whether they put pressure on her for the breakup—I don’t know what the deal was.

Did you love her? (Yes)

I think we were in love. I wasn’t one to stick with a girl for three years (Did you catch that? Three years!) if I wasn’t. I’m pretty sure you can call it love, but it’s just amazing how fast it can change like that. We were together every day. The feeling we got when we were with each other, it was just totally gone.

The article is quite long, but it IS informative. If you are like me you will have to read every single word. If you do, and find any other notable quotes that I may have missed feel free to let me know.

I have set aside time today to follow up on a couple of leads and I finally tracked down a very elusive source so I hope to have more later this weekend.

Fingers crossed folks.