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LGBTQ - Allegations of secrets of Congressman-elect George Santos’s (R-NY) past keep on coming out. The latest: he was married to a woman until 2019 but never mentioned it in his bio or to voters.
Santos became the first out LGBTQ+ Republican elected to the House of Representatives this past November. But this week the New York Times reported that a big chunk of his job history and education doesn’t check out.
Santos claims to have graduated from Baruch College in 2010, but the New York school could find no records of Santos attending. Santos’s biography on the National Republican Congressional Committee includes his attending New York University. NYU could find no history of his attending either.
Santos has also claimed to have worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs after graduating. Neither Wall Street firm had any record of his working there.
But now… he has an ex-wife?
Santos identifies as gay and says he lives with his husband Matt, a pharmacist who Santos claimed lost his job because the two were busted partying at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort without masks on at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. He has said he has been out for at least a decade, despite his opposition to LGBTQ+ equality and his support for discriminatory laws like Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law.
But just 12 days before he filed the official paperwork for his failed 2020 congressional campaign, a man named “George A. Devolder Santos” finalized a divorce with a woman named Uadla Santos Vieira Santos, court documents obtained by The Daily Beast show. Santos’s middle name is Anthony and his mother’s last name is Devolder – his campaign’s official name is “Devolder Santos for Congress” – and The Daily Beast says that there is only one person in the U.S. with that name. The divorce was uncontested.
Neither Santos nor Vieira Santos are responding to requests for comment.
Earlier this week, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency cast doubt on Santos’s claimed Jewish ancestry earlier this week too.
The outlet went back through Santos’ appearances and claims and concluded that “as with so much else in his personal narrative, there’s little to suggest truth beyond his own past comments.”
Friends of Pets, a charity that Santos claims to have founded in 2013, also appears to be bogus. The IRS found no records that the organization held tax-exempt status, and neither the New York nor New Jersey attorney general’s offices found records of the organization being registered as a charity, according to the Times. The intended beneficiary of a 2017 fundraiser thrown by Santos says they never received any funds from the event.
In response to the Times‘s original story, Santos released a wordy non-denial from his lawyer that accused Democrats of being homophobic and racist and claimed Santos was a victim of the media.
“George Santos represents the kind of progress that the Left is so threatened by – a gay, Latino, first generation American and republican who won a Biden district in overwhelming fashion by showing everyday voters that there is a better option than the broken promises and failed policies of the Democratic Party,” the statement said. “After four years in the public eye, and on the verge of being sworn in as a member of the Republican led 118th Congress, the New York Times launches this shotgun blast of attacks. It is no surprise that congressman-elect Santos has enemies at the New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations. As Winston Churchill famously stated, ‘You have enemies? Good. It means that you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.'”
The quotation attributed to the late U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill is from 19th-century French writer Victor Hugo.
During his most recent successful campaign, Santos said that abortion is as barbaric as slavery and voiced support for Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. He had previously supported Donald Trump, echoing the former president’s lies about the 2020 election in subsequently deleted social media posts.
He attended the January 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” rally that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol and was recently caught on video saying he wrote a “nice check” to help cover the legal fees of some of the rioters. Earlier this month, he attended a Manhattan gala alongside white nationalists and far-right conspiracy theorists.
(Alex Bollinger has been working in LGBTQ media for over a decade and has a Masters degree from the Paris School of Economics. He lives in Paris with his partner. Follow @alexpbollinger on Twitter. This story was first featured in LGBTQNation.com.)
