Photo by Gage Sizemore/Flickr
The congresswoman once told an interviewer she moved to Arizona for the weather. But details about her chaotic first marriage and claims of fraud were left out.
By Ronald J. Hansen |Arizona Republic
U.S. Rep. Debbie Lesko, like many transplants, has answered the question about why in the 1980s she traded her home in Wisconsin for the Arizona desert.
Like many others, she has said the warmer weather beckoned her and her ex-husband.
“We moved down to Phoenix, and that’s the story,” she said in a September 2020 interview with a podcast for Phoenix Christian Preparatory School. “That’s why I’m in Phoenix, Arizona, and I love Phoenix, Arizona. Wisconsin is beautiful, but it’s way too cold in the winter.”
The two-term Republican left out a more significant reason: She joined her then-boyfriend as he fled the police.
Lesko’s public story usually notes her reversal in fortune: A victim of domestic violence as a young woman, she rebuilt her life, got involved in her community and in Republican politics. From there, she won a seat in the state Legislature and then a seat in Congress.
Lesko, an advocate for victims’ rights in Washington, D.C., has declined to elaborate on the troubled, earlier period of her life except for a brief acknowledgement in 2020.
After her guarded, written-only responses to The Arizona Republic about her past in 2020, the newspaper looked more deeply into public records of a period of her life when she said she was a victim of physical and mental abuse.
The fuller story reveals a decade spent alongside a career criminal, with their lives cycling between temporary comfort in a new location to a hasty exit ahead of creditors or police.
In that era, stretching from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Lesko lived in Wisconsin, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. New details uncovered by The Republic include her status as a key witness to her then-husband’s felonies in Scottsdale, financial problems in New Mexico, more than a dozen payouts to her business customers from an Arizona fund to cover derelict contractors, and multiple pleas to judges for mercy for her then-husband and business partner.
Scottsdale detectives interviewed Lesko, then known by her maiden name, Debra Lorenz, and a series of aliases, in a 1985 case that sent her husband to prison, police records show. Authorities suspected she may have helped craft documents in connection with his fraudulent activity, but court records suggest they were intent on putting him, not her, behind bars.
Lesko is running unopposed for a third full term in Congress in a safely Republican district. She declined to discuss with The Republic the 1985 probe and other events in her first marriage.
