Democrats have seized on a political action committee’s allegations that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) worked as a prostitute and had multiple abortions—claims that rest on zero actual evidence.
On Tuesday, American Muckrakers PAC, co-founded by Democrat and former North Carolina state Senate candidate David Wheeler, published allegations claiming that Boebert had previously worked as an escort on a sugar-daddy website and underwent at least two abortions, one of which was related to her supposed sugar-baby work.
For Boebert’s critics, the idea that the anti-abortion rights conservative had in fact had multiple abortions herself offered irresistible proof of Boebert’s hypocrisy. The allegations quickly circulated in anti-Trump “Resistance” communities online. Occupy Democrats, a popular liberal Twitter account, conceded that it wasn’t clear whether the allegations were accurate. But it urged its nearly 400,000 Twitter followers to retweet the claims “IF YOU THINK THAT IT SOUNDS TRUE” anyway. Boebert’s name trended on Twitter.
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The allegations against Boebert were echoed by other prominent online liberal Twitter pundits, including some current and former Democratic politicians, such as former House candidate Brianna Wu, Bernie Sanders ally and former House candidate Nina Turner, and current Kentucky Senate hopeful Charles Booker.
Boebert tweeted about the allegations on Tuesday night, giving them “four pinocchios.” She is consulting with her lawyers about a potential legal case, a senior staffer in Boebert’s office said.
The salacious Boebert accusations were fueled, in part, by the fact that American Muckrakers PAC’s founders backed up their outlandish claims against another Republican congressman. They rose to some level of political fame earlier this year after releasing several lewd videos of Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) that helped doom his reelection campaign.
This time, though, the group doesn’t have videos to support their allegations. Instead, they have heavily redacted text message screenshots with an anonymous party supposedly close to Boebert. In the messages, the anonymous source sketches out a tale that enters the realms of lurid liberal fan fiction. The text messages describe Boebert as a sex worker plucked from obscurity on a sugar-daddy website by one of her clients, a member of the Koch family. That client, in the PAC’s telling, then introduced Boebert to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who urged her to run for office.
Wheeler argues that the text messages are enough proof, since he knows the person behind them.
“They’re not anonymous to me,” Wheeler told The Daily Beast. “I know who this individual is.”
When the source’s story isn’t wild enough, the interviewer on the other end of the text conversation—one of the PAC’s staffers—pushes the source further. After the anonymous source writes that they “don’t get” why Cruz would support Boebert’s political aspirations, the interviewer asserts, without any proof, that Boebert was blackmailing Cruz.
“It’s obvious,” the interviewer writes. “She blackmailed him.”
“Omg I never thought about that!” the source responds.
“Yep,” the interviewer writes back. “You know her. She’s a kniving (sic) little witch.”
At least one of the source’s claims can already be disproven. In the text message log, the source provided the PAC with a picture of what’s described as a picture of Boebert, wearing a short white dress, sitting on a bed. The source claims the photo was taken from Boebert’s profile on a sugar-daddy website. But the woman in the picture is actually Melissa Carone, a supposed voter-fraud witness cited by Rudy Giuliani, according to a Daily Mail report from 2020.
After The Daily Beast published this article pointing out the discrepancy, Wheeler deleted the white-dress picture from his anti-Boebert website. Wheeler says he’s investigating whether the Daily Mail accurately identified Carone as the woman in the picture.
“Now, if our source got it wrong or she mixed the photo up, we’ll correct it,” Wheeler said.
Boebert doesn’t have a particularly close relationship with the truth herself. Among other things, in 2020, Boebert said she hoped QAnon, the conspiracy theory that posits that Democrats sexually abuse children in Satanic rituals, was real. She has also claimed that she started carrying a gun after a man was beaten to death outside her restaurant. But CNN reported in 2021 that the man died of a meth overdose, not murder.
Wheeler claims his PAC has more information it could release about Boebert, but concedes they may soon direct their attention elsewhere.
“We may have done everything we can do in Colorado at this point,” Wheeler said.
