Levi Johnston Slams Sarah Palin

By David Saltonstall
DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT

Sarah Palin's almost son-in-law has launched a flurry of new slapshots at the former GOP veep hopeful—saying she's not a real  hockey mom, plotted to hide her daughter's pregnancy, and quit as Alaska's governor to make money.

The scathing allegations by Levi Johnston, 18, the father of Palin's grandson and a frequent critic of the Palin family, can be found in a first-person account by Johnston in this month's Vanity Fair, entitled "Me and Mrs. Palin."

It's not a pretty picture: Johnston casts Palin as virtually the exact opposite of her image as the moose-hunting matriarch of a large and happy family.

"Even before she was nominated," Johnston writes, "there wasn't much parenting in that house. Sarah doesn't cook, [her husband] Todd doesn't cook—the kids would do it all themselves: cook, clean, do the laundry, and get ready for school."

Johnston—who fathered a child with Palin's daughter, Bristol, but ended up cancelling wedding plans after last year's election—also said Palin quit her job as governor to cash in on her fame.

It was  a payday Palin started mulling within a few weeks of returning to Alaska after her failed run for vice president, Johnston wrote.

"She started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make ‘triple the money,'" Johnston said of Palin. "It was, to her, ‘not as hard.' She would blatantly say, ‘I want to just take this money and quit being governor.'

Palin has said she quit to avoid becoming a lame duck and to push her conservative agenda from outside the political system.

 Calls to Palin's political action committee seeking comment on Johnston's allegations were not immediately returned on Wednesday.

In one of the story's more explosive charges, Johnston also alleges that Palin asked him and Bristol not to reveal Bristol's pregnancy, and that she pushed to adopt the child as a way to keep the birth a secret.

"That way, she said, Bristol and I didn't have to worry about a thing," Johnston wrote.

"Sarah kept mentioning this plan," he added. "She was nagging—she wouldn't give up. She would say, ‘So, are you gonna let me adopt him?' We both kept telling her we were definitely not going to let her adopt the baby."

Johnston said that Palin's own family life was far from the image of wedded bliss presented to the nation—she and Todd rarely slept in the same room, Johnston alleged, and the couple often screamed about getting divorced.

"Todd would say, ‘All right, do you want a divorce? Is that what you want? Let's do it! Sign the papers!' They'd either stop and be fine or Sarah would go to her room. That's just how it was with them," he wrote.

But Todd always knew who was boss, Johnston added.

"[Sarah] would tell Todd to mow the grass, hang things up, and clean the house. And Todd would listen to her when she spoke," he wrote. "If she told Todd to do something, he'd do it."

What Palin didn't do much is two things for which she became famous during last year's campaign: go to her son's hockey games, or hunt wild animals.

"She pays no attention to her kids when the cameras aren't around," Johnston wrote. "[Her son] Track and I grew up playing hockey together, and I only saw her at about 15% of his games."

As for hunting: "She says she goes hunting and lives off animal meat—I've never seen it," wrote Johnston.

"She had a gun in her bedroom and one day she asked me to show her how to shoot it. I asked her what kind of gun it was, and she said she didn't know, because it was in a box under her bed."

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