Despite the term fake news becoming widespread in recent years, the idea that politicians are liars is hardly a new one – just ask the Romans. Yet, in a world where Donald Trump can claim it didn’t rain during his inauguration and extend the projected path of a hurricane with nothing but a sharpie and decades of unearned confidence, and where certain media outlets — even ones deemed to be liberal — will allow columnists to repeat lies as facts if it will drive clicks, George Santos has managed to shock us with his bare-faced untruths.
The newly elected politician has lied about everything from his ancestry to his mother’s death, and despite being called out in almost all of them remains in his job, making decisions that will affect millions of Americans. As Trump showed, the system of checks and balances designed to keep bad actors out of office and limit the powers of certain people is completely broken, as it relies on legislators having the tiniest bit of decency and shame. So, our only real recourse is to count up the lies and hope that someone, someday, actually holds these people to account. Or give various ethics committees actual power, although that would mean a whole host of other politicians likely being on the hook too.
Despite the title of this piece, listing all of Santos’ lies isn’t possible, even if the internet is ever-expanding like the universe. However, we think that some of his more egregious — and frankly disgusting — fantasies deserve more limelight thrown onto them. Who knows, one day being a pathological liar might even stop you from running for office instead of it being a prerequisite.
Who is George Santos?
Well, the whole point of this article is that we don’t really know. Pretty much all aspects of his biography have to be taken with a bucket of salt, from his ethnicity to his work history. However, there are some small morsels of fact in the muck that he’s driveled out since entering politics.
His parents and grandparents are Brazilian, and the Brazilian courts have described him as American. He claims to hold citizenship from both countries, and this seems to have been verified. He was also definitely under investigation for check fraud in the South American country as a teen, but moved to America to avoid the case. We can be sure he worked at HotelsPro as the New York Times has managed to verify that, but figuring out the rest of his life relies on guesswork and a bit of luck.
Currently, Santos serves as the U.S. representative for New York’s 3rd congressional district. He’s a member of the Republican Party and was elected to Congress in 2022 at the second time of asking (he ran unsuccessfully in 2020 against then-incumbent Thomas Suozzi). He is openly gay, but was also married to a woman for years, which has led to accusations it was a green card marriage. Ironically, he referred to President Joe Biden as a pathological liar, proving once and for all irony is not dead.
George Santos’s lies, explained
His Jew-ish ancestry
Santos has claimed to be of Jewish ancestry from his maternal grandparent’s side, and that his grandma and grandpa were holocaust refugees, despite both being born in Brazil. He later rode back on this claim and confirmed his Catholicism, although he did go on to stick to his statement his family had a Jewish background, referring to himself in a New York Post interview as “Jew-ish.” It’s been reported that Santos would make antisemitic jokes, and when people were offended he would bring up his alleged Jewish background.
Terrorism’s role in his mom’s demise
Santos claimed on his campaign website that his mother was “the first female executive at a major financial institution,” and that she was working in the South Tower during 9/11, later dying of undisclosed issues related to the attacks a few years after. However, on her 2003 visa application to the States, his mother described herself as a domestic worker and home care nurse, and also said she hadn’t been in the U.S. since 1999. Santos doubled down on the claim, tweeting about how the tragedy claimed his mother’s life, while also later tweeting that she died on Dec. 23rd – at best a bit of clumsy wording, at worst an attempt to gain sympathy by implying she was in the towers when they were hit.
Show me the money
The lies Santos has told about campaign finance and who funds him are so numerous that a complete list of them would make War and Peace seem like a beach read. A few highlights include lying about how much he’d donated to other candidates, giving multiple different figures for his net worth on candidate registration forms and to government officials, living in a building that was allegedly rented as a campaign headquarters, putting in countless $199.99 expenses — one cent below the threshold for providing receipts or other evidence for the spending — and listing fake donors (as reported by Mother Jones).
We all lie on our resume, but…
Santos has claimed to have a lot of unverified jobs, from being a Disney extra to working for Globo. He even allegedly told someone he lived with that he would be appearing in Vogue. No evidence can be found for any of these easily verifiable claims, nor for his insistence to donors that he was a producer for the much-maligned Spider-Man musical. In fact, the show’s lead producer denies Santos had anything to do with it, and the playbill didn’t contain his name.
Given he’s a natural scammer and the American financial system is effectively one big pyramid scheme, it should be no surprise he’s also claimed to be a hotshot Wall Street guy at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Predictably, both companies have confirmed there’s no record of him working at either, which is a shame as Santos’s moral compass is pretty perfectly attuned to Wall Street sensibilities. Of course, oversights happen, but in his lie about Citigroup, Santos claimed to have worked in the real asset division of the firm, even though Citigroup had sold its asset management division while Santos was a teen.
Possibly the grossest lie Santos has told about his employment history is his implication that he worked with some of the victims of the horrific 2022 nightclub shooting at Pulse. As with his mother, the congressman has shown a vile compulsion to center tragedies around himself, and when called out, change his story to make it more palatable. In this case, he claimed he was starting a new company around that time, and four of the victims were set to work for him. He put forward no evidence for this claim.
Victimless crimes?
Despite his privileged status and the alleged slew of high-powered jobs he’s taken over the years, Santos seems to be an unlucky man when it comes to crime. He claims that he’s been mugged twice, and had stones and eggs thrown at him after leaving a party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. He never reported these incidents to the police at the time, which seems a bit strange for somebody who claims to have a strong stance on law and order.
More interestingly, there were also never any witnesses to the crimes, even though the second mugging Santos claims happened to him allegedly took place outside of Fifth Avenue and 55th Street in New York. Those familiar with the Big Apple will know that’s one of the busiest intersections in the city, and the home of upmarket hotels and jewelers – which means lots of security and surveillance. Yet, Santos’s claims they took his briefcase and shoes cannot be verified. At least he made sure to clarify the robbers weren’t black.
Where did he go to school?
Another section in this article that could have its own Wikipedia page, Santos’s lies about his educational background are so varied and expansive it’s impressive – or would have been, if he hadn’t been caught. He claimed to have attended an elite prep school in New York but, as is par for the course with Santos, they have no record of his attendance.
When it comes to college Santos has lied about attending two: Baruch College and NYU. He spiced up the untruth by also claiming to have been a star volleyball player and have a 3.89 grade average at Baruch, where he definitely did not earn a degree in finance and economics.
Unlike most of his other lies, Santos has admitted to making this all up. His excuse: the mean political class would have looked down on him otherwise, and he got away with it when he first ran in 2020, so why should it matter two years on?
Houses all over
Like God or glitter after you’ve dropped it, Santos appears to be everywhere. While on the campaign trail in 2022 he claimed to have multiple rental properties in New York, but recanted this when interviewed by the Post. He also shifted his residency during his congressional campaign from one part of Queens to another, and appears to still be lying about where he’s living, claiming he’s in a house in Huntington, NY owned by his sister, even though she lives in Elmhurst.
The old cancer lie
We’ve seen how Santos likes to portray himself as a victim, but in a 2020 interview this took on a new low, when he claimed to have been the victim of brain cancer. In 2022, his campaign ignored questions about the supposed tumor.
Charity for me, not for thee
This final entry is once again taken from Santos’s greatest work of fiction, the biography on his campaign website. Showing an imagination that would have put Tolkein to shame when it comes to creating fantasies, the biography claimed he and his family worked with charities dedicated to kids born with epidermolysis bullosa, or EB, a rare genetic skin disorder. An investigation by Vice found this was untrue, and the website was later changed to remove all references to EB.
Santos also claims to have founded and run a charity for five years, Friends of Pets United (FOPU). A Times investigation found there was no evidence of FOPU ever having existed.
