Politics

George Santos claimed to be a male model according to former roommate

George Santos claimed to be a male model according to former roommate
Photo: Shutterstock

New revelations from a former roommate of gay U.S. Rep. George Santos (R-NY) include that Santos once told him he was a model who was going to be in Vogue magazine.

Florida pharmacist Yasser Rabello told Curbed he lived with Santos for a few months in 2013 and 2014 and that Santos’s sister, Tiffany, and Mom, Fatima, lived with them in the two-bedroom apartment in Queens.

Santos was going by Anthony Devolder then and reportedly befriended Rabello after the two met at a movie theater.

Rabello recounted several oddities about living with Santos and his family, including that Santos “told me he was a model and that he worked at New York Fashion Week and that he met all of the Victoria’s Secret models and would be in Vogue magazine.”

Despite this claim, Rabello said Santos “was home all day on his computer, just browsing the web…He said he was a reporter at Globo in Brazil.” Globo has since refuted Santos’s claim that he worked there, calling it “a lie, pure and simple,” when questioned by the Columbia Journalism Review.

And that wasn’t even half of it.

Rabello said that Santos and his family promised to create a partition in the living room so that he could have a private bedroom in the small apartment. When he moved in, however, they told him they tried with materials they had purchased, but it wasn’t going to work.

“But there were no signs at all that they’d attempted to do the work — no marks on the walls from pencils, no dust or anything like that.”

After that, Rabello said he ended up taking Santos’s bedroom and that Santos, whom he called Anthony, “Slept in the living room. There wasn’t even a sheet on the couch; he slept on it with no cover.”

The apartment also kept getting more crowded with another roommate moving in without Rabello’s knowledge, as well as a boyfriend of Santos. The apartment only had one bathroom.

As the number of people grew, Rabello said Santos and his family started hiding cases of water from him and stopped offering him food they cooked because it was getting expensive.

Rabello said he ultimately left the apartment after a screaming match with Santos’s mom, who refused to let him take his IKEA dresser with him when he moved out.

In previous interviews, Rabello has also said that Santos stole a “very expensive Armani dress shirt” from him and a $500 Burberry shirt from their fellow roommate Gregory Morey-Parker. Morey-Parker allegedly saw Santos wearing the shirt in an Instagram photo after Santos announced his 2020 run for Congress.

Two more of Santos’s self-described former roommates also said Santos stole money and items from them.

Santos has also admitted to lying to voters about graduating from Baruch College (where he claimed he was a star volleyball player) and New York University, working directly for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, and living at a fake address in his congressional district. He provided no additional proof to back up claims that he founded a charity called Friends of Pets, that he attended the Horace Mann prep school, that his grandparents escaped the Holocaust, that his mom died due to the September 11 terrorist attacks, and that he lost four employees in the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting.

He is also under investigation for allegedly violating campaign finance laws. Santos has refused to resign.

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