The Bible says the withheld wages of workers cry out against the boss who keeps them. Three former Shooters employees say Boebert cut $15 paychecks, called her staff “ignorant,” told a woman on probation to go borrow a gun, then announced she was saved and couldn’t sin. So much for loving thy neighbor.
Lauren Boebert built her whole political career on one story: the gun-toting small business owner who fought for her workers. The people who actually worked for her say it’s garbage. And she swore to it anyway.
In August 2023, in a declaration she signed under penalty of perjury in my federal defamation case against her, she wrote that from 2013 to 2022 she “owned a successful small business in Rifle, Colorado.”
Successful for who? Not for the people carrying her plates.
I now have three former Shooters Grill employees telling the same story, covering 2015 into 2020. Two of them talked to a licensed Colorado private investigator in October 2020, a week before Boebert won her first race. The third was Boebert’s best friend in middle school and high school, and later worked for her at Shooters. She first laid it out in private Facebook messages in January 2021. I interviewed her myself in 2022.
Now, some of you are thinking: old news, David. Fair enough. The Shooters years, Jayson, the drugs, the dropout story have all been chewed over by plenty of reporters, me included. I’m not pretending I discovered any of it this week.
But there was always an excuse baked into that coverage. She was young. She was a small-town restaurant owner who got in over her head. Give her time and Washington will smooth out the rough edges.
Well, she’s had time. Six years in Congress are in the rear view mirror. So it’s fair to go back and ask the question: has she grown? Has she matured? Has she become a better boss, a better neighbor, a better Christian?
No.
She got thrown out of a family musical in Denver for vaping and groping her date, then lied about it until the security video came out. Her office used your taxpayer-funded website to call me a liar and a likely perjurer for filing a sworn complaint. And when that didn’t make me go away, she marched into a Weld County courtroom and asked a judge to protect her from a reporter who lives 1,265 miles away in North Carolina.
Same Lauren. Bigger platform. Better paid. So yes, we’re going back to Rifle, because the woman her workers describe is the same one sitting in Congress today.
“Sell these t-shirts. That’s your checks.”
Shooters staff were supposed to get paid every week. Here’s what the old best friend says happened instead.
“She absolutely did pay us late,” she wrote. “Sometimes we’d wait up to two weeks! Twice over Christmas we didn’t get paid.”
One payday sticks with her. The crew had gone days without checks. Boebert’s mom said Lauren was down in Denver picking up a batch of t-shirts. When Lauren got back and her employees asked for their money, she had her answer ready.
“You want your checks? Sell these t-shirts. That’s your checks.”
Read that again. These were servers living on tips. She owed them wages, didn’t pay them, and told them to go hustle her merchandise to cover what she owed.
Meanwhile the boss was shopping. “Then she’d flaunt her purchases in our faces,” the friend said. “Like a new iPhone for Jayson. Or her new Escalade, or her airplane, or her new house!!!”
A few of them reported her to the state labor board and the Better Business Bureau. Nothing happened.
Remember 2020, when Boebert went national by defying COVID orders and keeping Shooters open? Her excuse was that she had to pay her employees. Her old friend’s reaction: “That was never a concern before!!!”
Same restaurant, same story
If it was just one disgruntled ex-employee, Boebert’s people would call it a grudge and move on. It isn’t just one.
On October 26, 2020, investigator Melinda Leon called two other former servers. Her notes are summaries, not transcripts. Read them anyway.
The first worked there from late 2015 into 2017. She said Boebert “never paid her crew on time” and “had her priorities wrong.” How wrong? According to the summary, Boebert “bought a plane but only managed to pay the employees one time a month.” That went on “the entire time she worked there.”
Some checks didn’t just come late. They came empty. Paychecks “would be for $15 or even zero dollars,” the notes say, because Boebert told staff they “made too much in tips so they didn’t get pay.” She said she worked 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. and got paid for eight hours.
That server owns her own restaurant now. She knows how payroll is supposed to work. Her words to the investigator: “The way Lauren runs a restaurant and treats people is scary.”
The second server lasted about eight months and quit in September 2019. “It is the worst job I’ve ever had,” she said. It was the only job that ever gave her nightmares. A bun slid off a burger that was missing its toothpick, and Boebert called her “ignorant.” Her car broke down, she called in two hours ahead, and Boebert pulled her off the schedule for a week. Asked to describe her old boss, she said “mean, hateful.”
Three people, years apart, who weren’t comparing notes. Boebert can call that a grudge. I call it what it is: a boss who treated the people making her money like they were disposable.
While I’ve got you
Boebert’s latest move: a protection order against a reporter 1,265 miles away.
On September 18, I published a sworn ethics complaint against Lauren Boebert. Six days later, on September 24, she walked into Weld County court without a lawyer and asked a judge for a civil protection order against me. A temporary order was signed that same afternoon. I wasn’t there, and nobody had served me. She got it to Fox News before she got it to me or my lawyers.
Read her petition and look at what she calls the incidents. It’s my reporting. My story. My posts on X. Photos the Daily Mail took and published. She doesn’t claim I’ve set foot in Colorado this year, called her, or come anywhere near her. I live in the mountains of North Carolina.
She tried this once before. In June 2022, while I was reporting on her, she filed for a protection order in Garfield County. It was never served. On July 20, 2022, the judge dismissed it at a hearing that neither Boebert nor her lawyer showed up for. Now she’s telling reporters she’s had a restraining order against me since 2022. The court docket says otherwise.
My lawyers are fighting it. That costs real money. She has a taxpayer-funded press office. I have you.
Donate to the legal defense fund. Every dollar goes to the fight.
The girl from Rifle High
Boebert’s official story is that she left high school to start raising a family. Her best friend from those years tells it another way.
“She didn’t drop out ‘to start raising a family,’” she wrote. She says Lauren left school, went to work at McDonald’s, and then met Jayson, who’d just moved to Rifle from Las Vegas.
Asked straight out about drugs, she didn’t hedge. “Lauren was absolutely a meth user.”
When I interviewed her in 2022, she confirmed it to me and went further. She told me about Lauren using meth in a trailer at a man camp, hot-boxing it.
That’s worth putting next to the other thing Boebert swore to in 2023: “I have never been a drug addict or a stripper.” Her lawyers told the federal court there was nothing behind the drug claims but “subtweets from unverifiable accounts.” Well, here’s her best friend from back then, putting it in writing.
She also described a violent relationship. “They would beat each other up.....then she got pregnant.” Lauren told her Jayson hit her. She saw it go the other direction too. “She punched him in the face once while I was at her house.”
Years later, Boebert offered her old friend a job at Shooters. “It was the worst!!!!” she wrote. “I’ve met a lot of different versions of this girl in the last 20 years, but this one is the worst!!!”
Guns as a costume
Shooters sold the world on armed waitresses. The servers I’m quoting say a lot of those guns were empty.
The 2019 server told the investigator she was on probation for a misdemeanor and wasn’t allowed to have a gun. She says Boebert knew it. Boebert handed her $500 cash for a gun and a concealed carry permit anyway. The gun shop turned her down, and she gave the money back.
Boebert didn’t let it go. According to the notes, she “told her to find a gun to carry knowing she was on probation” and “said to get someone to loan her a gun if necessary.” Right before she quit, the server borrowed a .38 from a neighbor. She never loaded it. She didn’t think some of the other girls loaded theirs either.
Boebert bragged about training her staff. This server says she never once went to a range with her. Boebert just “made fun of her for not having a gun.” Her read on the whole thing: Boebert “wears a gun more as a fashion statement.”
The other server carried an empty .380 until Boebert caught on and made her load it. They “never practiced shooting the gun at a firing range,” she said. She also told the investigator that “children were carrying guns, underage, in the restaurant.”
And if you ever wondered why a gun-themed restaurant didn’t serve beer, the 2019 server had the answer. Boebert told her “God wouldn’t let her restaurant prosper and would make it fail if she served alcohol.”
Sit with that for a second. She pushed a woman on probation to go borrow a gun so the restaurant’s gimmick looked right. She let kids walk around armed in a place that served the public. And this is the person who goes on TV to lecture America about guns.
“I AM NOT A SINNER”
The old best friend once watched Lauren and Jayson argue about religion at the restaurant. Jayson said, “we’re all sinners.”
Lauren lost it. “I beg your pardon?! I AM NOT A SINNER!!!! I have been saved!!!” Jayson told her that’s not how it works. She insisted it was.
“All of us just backed the hell away from her,” the friend wrote. “That’s how she reasons with herself and her actions!”
That explains everything. In Lauren Boebert’s head she’s already been forgiven, so nothing she does to anybody else counts. Not a late paycheck. Not a $15 one. Not a kid with a gun in her restaurant. Not dragging a reporter into court for doing his job.
Where this goes
Here’s who Lauren Boebert is when the cameras are off. She bought a plane while her servers waited weeks for checks. She called a waitress ignorant over a toothpick. She told a woman on probation to find somebody to loan her a gun. Then she signed a sworn declaration calling it all a success story. She has never answered for any of it, and she’s counting on nobody making her.
I’m making her.
Shooters closed in 2022 after the landlord didn’t renew the lease. The people who waited on those checks are still around. So is the labor board complaint they say they filed. I’m going after the paper.
If you worked at Shooters, if you got a $15 check or no check at all, I want to hear from you. Email me at david@americanmuckrakers.com or text, WhatsApp, or Signal me at 312-213-6001. I protect my sources. Ask around.
And if you want this reporting to keep coming while Boebert spends your tax dollars attacking the reporter, chip in here. I can’t do it without you.
DBW
About the Author
David B. Wheeler is the president and co-founder of American Muckrakers, the Western North Carolina accountability organization best known for helping end Madison Cawthorn’s congressional career in 2022, the rare instance in modern politics of a sitting incumbent losing his own primary because somebody bothered to do the homework. Since then, American Muckrakers has turned its attention to Lauren Boebert, Ken Paxton, and a growing roster of politicians who confuse public office with a personal ATM. He publishes accountability journalism at Muckrakers.Today.
Wheeler co-hosts the MUCK YOU! podcast with Col. Moe Davis, the retired Air Force colonel and former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay. He is the author of Color the Crooks, Case File #001: Lauren Boebert, the coloring book James Carville endorsed with the words “She earned every damn page. Buy it.” *He is also the founder of VoteROI.com, a political data company built on 86.9 million FEC records that helps donors figure out where their money actually goes, which, as this essay makes clear, is a question more people should be asking.
Before all that, Wheeler spent three decades in politics, elections, and event production in more than 50 countries on all seven continents. Along the way he lowered the Mississippi River, produced the first professional sports event ever held in Moscow, and produced the first marathon ever run on Antarctica. His political education started early: Page for the Iowa House of Representatives, intern in the United States Senate, and National Committeeman for Iowa on the Young Democrats of America national committee. David was the lead advance guy for then Senator Obama in Iowa City, Iowa, in October of 2006, and then again during his presidential announcement in Waterloo, Iowa, in February 2007. And, he has some good stories from both experiences.
An Iowa native and proud Hawkeye, Wheeler is a father of three and lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina, in the district Chuck Edwards is currently failing. He believes sunlight is the best disinfectant, filings don’t lie, and the loudest guy in the room is usually the one with the most to hide.
And, Beetlejuice Boebert claimed she was going to sue him. She never did, so David sued her in Federal Court in Denver and partially won.
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This publication is First Amendment protected speech and commentary on matters of public concern. All individuals referenced are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. No portion of this publication may be used for commercial purposes without the written consent of American Muckrakers PAC, Inc. and David B. Wheeler.