Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez's college past included fetish ball funding, drug-related events, and gruesome roommate stories

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the Washington Democrat who built her brand on blue-collar authenticity and common-sense moderation, is facing a growing pile of allegations about her college years, fetish party funding, drug-adjacent campus events, a graphic chicken killing, and claims from former roommates that her working-class image is largely invented.

The congresswoman, who represents Washington's 3rd Congressional District, has not responded to requests for comment. The allegations, drawn from old social media posts, college records, and podcast interviews with people who lived with her, paint a picture sharply at odds with the auto-repair-shop populist she plays on the campaign trail.

And that gap, between the image and the record, is the real story heading into her re-election fight against Republican state Senate Minority Leader John Braun.

The Reed College years

Gluesenkamp Perez graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in 2012. Reed is a private liberal arts school that now costs roughly $74,000 a year. A 2023 profile in Reed Magazine described her as a "thoughtful, creative student" with a "reputation for being down for anything."

What "down for anything" meant in practice is now getting a closer look. A report detailing her college-era activities points to social media posts from the Reed College Student Senate's official X account showing that Gluesenkamp Perez, who helmed the student senate's finance committee in 2012, secured $4,000 to throw a latex-heavy "Fetish Ball" featuring a DJ and a "dark room." The event was organized by the Reed College Fetish Club.

That same club, per Reed's own 2012 Paideia course catalog, taught courses including "BDSM 201", which introduced students to "flogging and caning, violet wand, and basic rope bondage", and a "kinky crafts" course on creating do-it-yourself bondage gear.

Another post from the student senate's X account references an "LSD giveaway" at the student union in 2012 and promotion of "Nitrogen Day," when students would reportedly gather on the quad to inhale nitrous oxide. Gluesenkamp Perez sat on the finance committee that oversaw funding for these events. Whether she personally participated in any drug use at the events is not established in the available record.

Reed's drug culture was well documented long before Gluesenkamp Perez arrived. Willamette Week reported in 2008 that the college circulated a student-authored user's guide covering "pot and alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, 'benzos,' LSD, DMT, mescaline, MDMA, PCP, ketamine, nitrous oxide, opiates, depressants and psilocybin." This was the environment she chose, and then helped fund as a student leader.

Roommate allegations: the chicken, the avocados, and the van

The most vivid claims come from Isaac Eger, a former roommate who appeared on a January episode of the "COEXIST Inc." podcast. Eger described Gluesenkamp Perez as someone who crashed in a friend's crawl space, an attic above a garage, after a breakup, and who tried to pay her share of rent with spoiled produce.

Eger, who said he charged between $50 and $75 a month for rent, described one particular incident in graphic terms on the podcast. He said Gluesenkamp Perez attempted to decapitate a chicken with a dull kitchen knife during what he called an urban farming experiment. He claimed she "was grinding this thing down with a dull knife," that "the chicken's decapitated head just gasping for air," and that "she held up the body as it spazzed out and blood went everywhere." Roommates, he said, were "frantically googling humane ways to kill the animal" while the act was underway.

Eger also alleged that Gluesenkamp Perez bred her pet rabbit, named "Meatball," and ate its offspring, claiming she "started a rabbit-eating cult."

On the rent question, Eger was blunt:

"The kind of avocado where you can't even turn it into guacamole or anything. And she's like, 'Here's rent.'... She would literally never pay rent."

Separately, investigative journalist Dan Boguslaw, himself a Reed College alumnus, said on "The Insurgents" podcast that after graduating, Gluesenkamp Perez peddled what he described as "extremely low-quality weed" out of a van, loitering around Reed's campus to move "large quantities of low-quality cannabis." No arrest or charge related to this claim appears in the available record.

Gluesenkamp Perez's office did not respond to a request for comment on any of these allegations.

The 'cosplay' question

The deeper political problem for Gluesenkamp Perez is not any single anecdote. It is the accumulating evidence that her carefully constructed working-class biography may not hold up under scrutiny.

She has claimed to have worked in an "iPhone case factory", a detail that sounds like assembly-line labor. But the Washington Free Beacon reported that the "factory" was actually a small boutique artisanal workshop called Grove, which made hand-crafted bamboo iPhone cases and sometimes operated out of someone's basement. That is a long way from a factory floor.

Despite claiming financial hardship that required three jobs to pay tuition, Gluesenkamp Perez took a months-long bicycle trip from Portland to Quito, Ecuador, in 2010, not a typical austerity measure. Her father, whom she claimed cut off financial support, helped finance her first home just two years after graduation. She carries no student loan debt despite attending a school where tuition alone ran roughly $39,000 a year at the time.

Eger's summary was pointed: "She's definitely cosplaying as a poor person." He called her working-class narrative "part of her lore." Whether voters in rural southwest Washington agree with that assessment will matter a great deal in the months ahead. Gluesenkamp Perez is not the first Democrat to face uncomfortable questions about the gap between public image and private record, but the volume of specific claims here is unusual.

The political record

Gluesenkamp Perez flipped Washington's 3rd Congressional District in 2022, defeating Republican Joe Kent in a district that leans toward Donald Trump. She has positioned herself as a moderate willing to break with her party. She voted for a Department of Homeland Security funding package that included $10 billion for ICE, saying: "The Department of Homeland Security is extremely important to my community. I could not in good conscience vote to shut it down."

That vote earned her some crossover credibility. But her earlier political work tells a different story. She served on the Washington Democrats Executive Committee, which passed a platform that included decriminalizing drugs and sex work. The distance between that platform and a $10 billion ICE vote is wide enough to raise a fair question: which position reflects her actual convictions?

Her opponent, John Braun, has not yet made these college-era revelations a central campaign issue, at least not publicly. But in a competitive district where authenticity is the candidate's core selling point, the allegations from former roommates and old campus records present a direct challenge to that brand.

Democrats have faced a string of embarrassing personal revelations about their candidates in recent cycles. Maine's Graham Platner refused to apologize for mocking a wounded veteran, drawing national attention to the kind of personal conduct questions that can define a campaign.

The pattern is familiar: a candidate builds an appealing public image, wins office, and then watches as the internet and old acquaintances fill in the parts of the story that were left out of the campaign bio. When the gaps are wide enough, voters notice.

What remains unanswered

Several questions remain open. The social media posts from Reed's student senate account describe events Gluesenkamp Perez helped fund, but the verbatim text of those posts has not been fully published. Whether she personally attended or participated in the drug-related events, as opposed to simply approving their budgets, is not established.

The timeline of her alleged crawl-space living arrangement and the cannabis-selling claims from Dan Boguslaw lack specific dates. Boguslaw's claim is secondhand podcast testimony, not a documented arrest or charge. Eger's accounts are vivid and specific but come from a single witness who clearly has a dim view of his former roommate.

None of this has produced legal consequences. No arrests, no charges, no formal investigations have been reported. The Democratic Party has shown a willingness to rally behind candidates even when their personal histories raise serious questions, and Gluesenkamp Perez may benefit from that instinct.

But the political question is simpler than the legal one. Gluesenkamp Perez asked voters in a conservative-leaning district to trust her as a straight-talking, blue-collar moderate. The emerging record suggests she was a Reed College student senator who funded fetish balls and presided over budgets for drug-themed campus events, then, if her former roommates are to be believed, lived in a crawl space, offered rotten avocados as rent, and sold low-grade cannabis out of a van.

Voters can decide for themselves whether that biography belongs to a working-class moderate or to something else entirely. What they deserve, at minimum, is an honest answer from the congresswoman herself. So far, they haven't gotten one.