Separating fact from the many, fabulous fabrications of George Santos

Congressman George Santos’ long list of lies appear to have finally caught up with him.

The 34-year-old Republican was arrested on Wednesday and charged with 13 federal counts, including money laundering, theft of public funds and false statements to the House of Representatives.

He surrendered to federal law enforcement and was taken to the Eastern District of New York federal courthouse in Central Islip, on Long Island, where he pleaded not guilty in a brief court appearance.

In 2022, Mr Santos was elected as the Republican Party’s first openly gay, non-incumbent member of Congress, and touted himself as a living embodiment of the American dream.

But he has since been exposed as a serial fabricator, and now an accused criminal.

Here’s what we know about George Anthony Devolder Santos.

A ‘first generation American’

Given his prodigious propensity for telling fibs, basic details of Mr Santos’ personal history, such as his real name, marital status, and precisely where he was born merit a healthy dose of skepticism.

According to his congressional website, Mr Santos is a “first generation American” born in Jackson Heights, Queens, in July 1988. His parents were both Brazilian immigrants – Fátima Devolder, who worked as a housekeeper, and Gercino Antônio dos Santos Jr, a house painter. He has a younger sister, Tiffany Lee Devolder Santos.

Former co-workers who worked with Mr Santos at Dish Network in College Point in 2011 and 2012 told Patch that he used to tell them he was born in Brazil. Then, he was known as Anthony Devolder or George Devolder.

His true birthplace is significant because the Constitution requires members of Congress to have been US citizens for seven years before election. Mr Santos has claimed in interviews that he is a dual citizen of Brazil and the United States.

Mr Santos attended the Mamie Fay School primary school in Astoria and Woodside Intermediate School 125 in Sunnyside, Queens, former classmates have said.

Tiffany Bogosian told the Washington Post that even at a young age, Mr Santos would fabricate parts of his biography. She put this down to his impoverished background, and said he had still been learning English while at junior high and was bullied during his time there.

From 2008 to 2011, Mr Santos lived in Brazil where his mother was living at the time.

In 2008, Mr Santos was accused by Brazilian authorities of using a stolen checkbook and fake name at a clothing shop outside Rio de Janeiro.

Citing court documents, the New York Times reported that Mr Santos told police in 2010 that he and his mother had stolen a checkbook from a man that she used to work for, and used it to make $1,300 in illegal purchases of clothes and shoes.

He reportedly admitted the illicit activity in a post on a Brazilian social media site in 2011, saying “I know I screwed up, but I want to pay”, the Times reported.

The criminal case ground to a halt in 2011 after Mr Santos could not be located by Brazilian authorities, as he had returned to the US.

He later denied that he was a criminal “in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world” in an interview with the New York Post.

In March, Mr Santos admitted the crime and agreed to pay the victim back as part of a non-prosecution agreement with Brazilian prosecutors, CNN reported.

On the campaign trail, Mr Santos repeatedly claimed that he is of Jewish descent and that his grandparents were European Jews who fled Hitler.

Jewish cultural groups and online sleuths later unearthed records showing his grandparents were born in Brazil.

Mr Santos would later tellthe New York Post that he had said he was “Jew-ish”.

‘Sue me’

While living in Brazil, Mr Santos also reportedly performed as a drag queen named Kitara Ravache as a young man.

In January, Brazilian drag artist Eula Rochard posted photos to social media herself with a person wearing a red dress, bright red lipstick and dangling chandelier earrings who she identified as Mr Santos.

Journalist Joâo Fragah also said he had interviewed Mr Santos in costume.

A Politico investigation later found that a user on Wikipedia named Anthony Devolder claimed to have participated in drag shows in Brazil as a teenager.

Mr Santos issued a furious denial of the claims on social media, at a time when his Republican Party was vilifying and seeking to ban drag queens from performing in some states.

“The most recent obsession from the media claiming that I am a drag Queen or ‘performed’ as a drag Queen is categorically false,” he wrote on Twitter.

“The media continues to make outrageous claims about my life while I am working to deliver results.”

In statements to media the next day, Mr Santos appeared to admit he had, in fact, dressed in drag.

“I was young and I had fun at a festival. Sue me for having a life,” he said.

He moved back to New York in 2011, working as a bilingual customer services representative at a call centre for Dish Network, a satellite TV firm, in Queens, where he would have earned about $15 an hour.

Former colleagues told the Times that he was an “ambitious man with fine tastes”, and used to boast about owning property in Brazil, Nantucket and New York. In reality, he was sharing a small rented apartment with his mother and sister in Queens.

He claimed to his friends to be a business school graduate of NYU. In separate interviews, he said he had graduated from Baruch College in 2010, where he was a star volleyball player. All of which was later proven to be false when both denied having any record of Mr Santos attending.

He further boated on an archived version of his 2020 congressional website, that he attended the elite private school Horace Mann in New York, but failed to graduate due to financial diffuculties.

Mr Santos would later claim in a campaign biography that it was around this time that he began rising through the ranks at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs as part of a successful career on Wall Street, where he claimed to have managed more than $80m. Neither bank had any record of him being employed there.

In February, the non-profit Reclaim the Records obtained court records showing he married a Brazilian woman in 2012. His former wife, who has not been identified, filed for divorce in 2019.

He has since said he is married to a Brazilian man, who he identified by the first name of Matt. He reportedly told Brazilian publication Piaui in November 2020 that his husband’s name is Matheus Gerard.

Some time in 2016, he moved to Florida where he worked for HotelsPro, a global hospitality marketplace and changed his driver’s licence to a Florida address.

Early political career

Mr Santos’ murky and ever-changing biography makes it difficult to parse fact from fiction during his early forays into politics.

In 2018, he began volunteering for the campaign of Republican Vickie Paladino, who was running for state Senate. He reportedly boasted of his ties to Wall Street donors who could contribute, but did little actual work.

The next year, he reportedly made his first attempt to get elected to Congress, but failed to secure enough signatures to get on the Queens County Republican Committee.

He joined United for Trump, a small New York group of Republican supporters of the then-president, and launched a first bid for Congress in November 2019.

That month he launched his campaign for the United States House of Representatives in New York’s 3rd Congressional District in 2020 against Democratic incumbent Thomas Suozzi.

No other candidates put their names forward. When pressed by reporters why he lived out of the district, he claimed to reside at an address that turned out to be his treasurer’s.

He lost the general election by about 46,000 votes, but still exceeded Republican expectations for the strongly Democratic district. He refused to concede the election, echoing Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud.

Mr Santos spoke at the Stop the Steal rally at the ellipse in Washington DC on the day of the Capitol riots on January 6, claiming his election had been stolen. A roommate would later claim that Mr Santos had worn his stolen $520 Burberry scarf to the rally.

In 2020, while running for Congress, he began working at Florida investment firm Harbor City Capital, which was later accused in a civil lawsuit by the Security and Exchange Commission of running a $17m Ponzi scheme.

The SEC banned the firm from doing business in Alabama, and alleged it was “out to deceive Alabamians and profit off unsuspecting investors by using dazzling marketing tactics to sell unregistered bonds.”

He has publicly denied any involvement in the alleged fraud.

Mr Santos also set up the Devolder Organization, which he was the sole owner of and claimed he managed $80m in assets for the “capital introduction consulting” firm.

Mr Santos hosted the Talking GOP public-access radio show from January to May 2020.

He would schmooze guests, who were mostly figures from the Queens Republican Party.

On Talking GOP, he said that he was Catholic, and that his maternal grandfather had converted from Judaism to Catholicism before the Holocaust. “I believe we are all Jewish, at the end – because Jesus Christ is Jewish.”

‘He’s most likely just a fabulist’

Soon after his 2020 election defeat, Mr Santos began raising money for the next congressional race.

New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who is now the third-ranking Republican in the House, was an early supporter, and endorsed him in 2021.

In late 2021, a vulnerability study commissioned with Mr Santos’ approval found alarming revelations, and many of his staffers resigned, according to the Times.

Among other things, it found he had falsely claimed to have been endorsed by Mr Trump, along with many of the lies about his job history and personal wealth that have since been revealed.

Congressional leaders learned of his deceptions by 2022. According to the Times, Dan Conston, the leader of the Kevin McCarthy-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund, tried to circulate the report’s findings to prominent donors.

Mr Santos was then the beneficiary of two pieces of luck, that paved the way for his election to Congress in 2022. Thomas Suozzi, the 3rd District’s incumbent lawmaker, announced he would not seek re-election.

Then during redistricting, a new congressional district map gerrymandered to favour Democrats was thrown out by the New York Supreme Court and replaced with a new map that added a swathe of Republican areas.

Mr Santos again ran unopposed for the Republican nomination, and faced Democrat Robert Zimmerman in the general election, the first House race between two openly gay candidates.

An opposition research file on Mr Santos produced by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee found that elements of his biography had been fabricated and required further research, a Times investigation found.

Mr Zimmerman later said he didn’t have sufficient resources for this, and focussed his attention on voter outreach.

The North Shore Leader, a weekly news publication based in the affluent Long Island neighbourhood in the 3rd District, was the only media organisation to report on discrepancies in Mr Santos’ financial disclosure forms.

In September 2022, it reported that Mr Santos’ net wealth had risen from essentially zero, and with an annual salary of $55,000 in 2020, to $11m in assets just two years later.

The news site endorsed Mr Zimmerman, stating that his opponent “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot ... he’s most likely just a fabulist – a fake”.

Mr Santos went on to take the district that November by eight points.

Santos’ lies revealed post-election

A bombshell New York Times report on 19 December revealed to a broader audience for the first time many of Mr Santos’ fabrications and lies about his employment and education history.

A flood of further embellishments soon followed, including the 9/11 -related death of his mother, claims he had been a producer on the failed Broadway production of Spider-Man, how he had cheated associates out of clothes and cash, and had stolen $3,000 that had been raised to save a disabled veteran’s pet dog.

A pressure group formed by citizens in his 3rd Congressional District began holding protests outside his campaign office to try to force his expulsion from Congress.

In an interview with Semafor attempting to explain his newfound wealth, he claimed to have made his money by taking a cut from matching sellers of luxury goods like planes and yachts with potential buyers.

As Mr Santos’ pile of scandals grew, he threw himself behind Kevin McCarthy’s campaign for Speaker of the House.

Mr McCarthy welcomed the support given his razor-thin majority, and refused to take action on any of the mounting ethical scandals, even as a growing number of New York Republicans called for him to be removed from Congress.

At the State of the Union in February, Mr Santos had an altercation with Mitt Romney after the Utah Senator told him he didn’t belong in Congress and “should be embarrassed.”

“Tell that to the 142,000 who voted for me”, Mr Santos reportedly replied.

Following the speech, Mr Romney called the New York Republican a “sick puppy.”

In March, the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into whether Mr Santos had “engaged in unlawful activity”.

At the time, Mr McCarthy said he would remain a member in good standing in the GOP caucus until a full investigation is complete.

Credit card scams and unpaid rent

Revelations about Mr Santos’ alleged grifts and schemes continued to emerge.

In February, it was reported that New York City housing court records showed that Tiffany Lee Devolder Santos owed $39,050 in back rent to the landlord.

Mr Santos had reportedly failed to pay rent in the Queens apartment he shared with his sister before being elected to Congress in a state of disrepair.

The next month, a Brazilian man who was deported from the US after being convicted of credit card skimming fraud reportedly told federal authorities that Mr Santos was the mastermind of the scheme.

“I am coming forward today to declare that the person in charge of the crime of credit card fraud when I was arrested was George Santos / Anthony Devolder,” Gustavo Ribeiro Trelha wrote in a declaration obtained by Politico and sent to the FBI, the US Secret Service office in New York, and the US Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York, by Trelha’s attorney Mark Demetropoulos.

Trelha claimed Mr Santos had taught him how to skim card information and clone cards in Seattle in 2017.

“He gave me all the materials and taught me how to put skimming devices and cameras on ATM machines,” Trelha wrote in his statement.

Trelha claimed Mr Santos visited him in jail in Seattle after his arrest and threatened him not to reveal his part in the scheme to authorities.

Responding to the allegations at the time, Mr Santos told reporters that he was “innocent”.

In January, Mr Santos also claimed to have been the victim of a mugging and assassination attempt in New York.

Political positions

Mr Santos has claimed in interviews that he was exactly the kind of candidate that could grow the Republican Party’s reach with younger voters.

He aligned himself strongly with Donald Trump and the Maga wing of the Republican caucus, attending the former president’s indictment on criminal charges in New York last month.

Other than platitudes about wanting to be a “voice for every community in the district”, Mr Santos does not set out any ideological vision on his campaign website or in statements.

In February, he was spotted wearing an AR-15 lapel in Congress after a spate of recent mass shootings.

He described abortion as “barbaric” in a 2022 speech to the Whitestone Republican Club.

He introduced several pieces of legislation in early 2023; including bills to raise the cap on state and local tax deduction and cut federal funding to countries that persecute LGBTQ people.

Mr Santos raised eyebrows in April, when he introduced the Medical Information Nuanced Accountability Judgment Act, which would ban the government from mandating certain vaccines.

The acronym, MINAJ, was thought to relate to Nicki Minaj’s comments in 2021 that her cousin’s friend had become impotent and suffered swollen testicles after taking the Covid-19 vaccine.

Arrest and indictment

Late afternoon on Tuesday 9 May, CNN revealed that Mr Santos had been criminally charged by prosecutors in New York’s Eastern District.

Mr Santos is accused of defrauding donors by spending “thousands of dollars of the solicited funds on personal expenses, including luxury designer clothing and credit card payments.”

Mr Santos allegedly lied on financial disclosure forms he filed to the House by overstating his income from and failing to disclose income from another, while also lying about his earnings from his company, the Devolder Organization.

Mr Santos fraudulently used campaign donations to buy “thousands of dollars of the solicited funds on personal expenses, including luxury designer clothing and credit card payments”, the indictment claimed.

He also stands accused of insurance fraud for applying for Covid employment benefits in New York while still employed in Florida.

He was released on $500,000 bail, and had to surrender his passport, the Associated Press reported.

Following Donald Trump’s playbook, Mr Santos called the charges a “witch hunt” and said he intended to run again for Congress outside court.

Some Republicans have called for Mr Santos to leave Congress immediately. Mr McCarthy has said he will “look” at the charges.