Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Co.)—or brunette Marjorie Taylor Greene—has apparently written a memoir, and it’s rife with details somehow more shocking than the fact that the gun-loving congresswoman is literate enough to write a book. In My American Life, released on Tuesday, Boebert, who’s spent the better part of the last couple months railing against “groomers” and the great safety risk drag shows pose to children, goes to bat for her “hunky husband,” who once served jail time for public indecency and lewd exposure after exposing himself to a teen at a bowling alley. Boebert claims this is all based on a misunderstanding.
According to Boebert, on the night in question, her now-husband and then-boyfriend Jayson Boebert had been “bonding” over drinks with her stepfather and some friends at Fireside Lane Bowling Alley in Rifle, Colorado (of course). It was totally a family affair, until an apparently nosy, 17-year-old bartender barged in, lusting after Jayson, who, err looks like this.
According to Lauren, Jayson’s friends had told the bartender—again, a teenage girl—about “a great tattoo” Jayson had “in a private area,” which “made her curious, so she pressed Jayson to show it to her right there at the bar.” Lauren claims the teen girl simply “wouldn’t stop” asking to see the private tattoo, and it was only then, after her repeated begging (uh huh), that Jayson merely “acted like he was going to unzip his pants” after having too much to drink.
When the bowling alley’s owner confronted Jayson and asked him to leave, he refused. “The two argued, and Jayson threw a basket of fries at the owner,” Lauren casually wrote. “The police were called.” Boys will be boys!
The whole ordeal has been pretty well-known since long before Boebert’s memoir, but public record tells a slightly different story than the congresswoman’s surely unbiased recounting. Court documents published by the New York Post last year show Jayson exposed himself not just to the teenage bartender, but to at least one other woman. They both told the owner of the bowling alley, who then called law enforcement. Though Lauren doesn’t mention this in her memoir, she was present for the entire incident. Jayson ultimately pleaded guilty and subsequently earned four days in jail and two years of probation.
In Boebert’s memoir, she acknowledges her husband’s guilty plea and that he was charged with “indecent exposure to a minor”—but she maintains that he was innocent: “He knew the truth—and the truth was, he didn’t do what he was accused of. But the entire experience opened Jayson’s eyes to the reality that he needed the alcohol and anger management classes that came with the plea deal.” For this, Boebert claims “the left” should applaud rather than ridicule Jayson.
Of course, the bowling alley incident wasn’t Jayson Boebert’s only brush with law enforcement that year. In February 2004, he also faced a domestic violence charge against Lauren, and last year, a spokesman for the Garfield associate county court told the New York Post that Jayson “did unlawfully strike, shove or kick … and subjected [Lauren] to physical contact.” The lovebirds married the following year in 2005, when she was 18 and he was 20, and today, they share four children. The couple oft posts photos of their house full of guns, with their young children often holding them.
Of the criminal charges against her husband from over a decade before she was elected, Boebert’s chief of staff told the Post last year that this was simply an orchestrated attack “by the Democrats from the last campaign.”
Boebert, you’ll recall, is a leading voice in the right-wing movement to ban children from drag shows out of “safety concerns”—perhaps she should consider banning them from bowling alleys. I hear there are some real weirdos there!