In 2010, right before the Arizona GOP primary, POLITICO reported that then-congressional contender Ben Quayle had previously served as a contributor to DirtyScottsdale.com, the forerunner to thedirty.com. The son of former Vice President Dan Quayle had operated under a pseudonym.

Nik Richie, the owner and editor of thedirty.com, charged that Quayle used the name “Brock Landers,” a porn star character in the movie “Boogie Nights.” Quayle disputed that; Richie said at the time that “He is 100 percent without a doubt Brock Landers.”

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“I’m a tall drink of water who is easy on the eyes. Plus, my moral compass is so broken I can barely find the parking lot. Long story short, on a scale of 1-to-10, I’m awesome,” read one post attributed to that username.

Quayle did acknowledge that he knew Richie and had connected him to an intellectual property attorney. Richie’s real name is Hooman Karamian — “Nik Richie” is a nod to Nicole Richie, he said in one interview, following Perez Hilton’s take on Paris Hilton’s name. He and Quayle met through Richie’s ex-wife, Quayle told POLITICO in 2010. Other news reports indicate that they met in 2005 at a Lake Tahoe-based golf tournament.

DirtyScottsdale.com launched in 2007 as a nightlife gossip site, featuring photos and commentary on the city’s party scene.

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“When it was created, it was a different site with a satirical focus on Scottsdale nightlife and looked nothing like it looks today,” Quayle initially said in a statement.

“He restructured his life knowing that one day he would run for public office,” Richie asserted to POLITICO at the time. “He said, ‘I cannot have any involvement, and you cannot tell a soul I am part of Dirty Scottsdale because it would ruin any political chance I would have in the future.’”

Quayle went on to win the primary, but that didn’t stop the Democratic candidate’s campaign from saying that “this is an election between Jon Hulburd and Brock Landers.”

“It is amazing that the media will take a casual acquaintance and turn it into something tawdry, taking the word of a smut peddler at face value,” Quayle fired back at the pressahead of the primary. “But I will not back down, and I will continue to fight for our future.”

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Richie, who did not return a request for comment for this article, is used to the tough talk. He’s been chastisedby Dr. Phil on-air. And his site was sued for defamation by a former NFL cheerleader over user-generated postings about her, in a case that spurred debate about free speech on the Internet. She was awarded $338,000 in damages, but Richie is reportedly appealing the ruling.

Quayle, for his part, went on to win his 2010 races before losing his seat last year in a Republican primary. He is now a senior director in the government and public affairs division at Clark Hill PLC, a law firm.

Meantime, thedirty.com has a section devoted to “dirty politics” which this week is dominated, naturally, by Weiner. A woman has alleged on the site that she and the former Democratic congressman had a sexually explicit online relationship that started last summer and stretched until the winter.

The charges have roiled his campaign here this week, dominating his press conferences and leading Weiner to say on Thursday that he believes he engaged in sexual, virtual relationships with three women even after an accidental tweet of a crotch shot caused him to resign from Congress in 2011.

On Thursday, Richie posted what he said were uncensored pictures of Weiner’s genitals — a move he defended with a newspaper-style editorial, saying that he did so to enhance the public’s knowledge about the mayoral hopeful.

“Today is the first time in our company history that TheDirty.com has published extreme nude images without censor because New York deserves better leadership than this,” he charged in the post.

Addressing potential voters, he wrote, “New York City, now is that time! As the flagship city of the United States, you must use this as an opportunity to tell the world that dirty politicians like Anthony Weiner don’t deserve to represent you.”

In an interview with HuffPost Live this week, Richie — who also served up salacious alleged details about Weiner’s phone sex dynamic — said he got the story because “we have a huge hardcore fan base, we call it the Dirty Army. This girl happened to be a fan of mine and thedirty.com.”

Richie, 34, is the author of the 2013 memoir “Sex, Lies and the Dirty. ” He married his second wife Shayne Lamas, a winner of the show “The Bachelor,” in Las Vegas within 24 hours of meeting one another. They have a young daughter but have detailed their marital challenges on the VH1 show “Couples Therapy.”