Another Santos? Cracks found in newly elected GOP lawmaker's backstory

Another newly elected Republican House member has had doubt cast on her backstory after a deeply-reported Washington Post profile found several discrepancies.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) has described herself as a Hispanic conservative who grew up poor, survived a home invasion and lost her grandmother to HIV/AIDS due to heroin use. But those details have come as a surprise to family members and friends who knew her before she entered politics about five years ago, reported the Washington Post.

“She had everything, what she needed and more,” said her aunt Jolanta Mayerhofer, "and not only did [her mother] Monica provide for her, but my father-in-law did, too.”

Luna grew up in Los Angeles and joined the U.S. Air Force in 2009, at age 19, the Post reported. Friends who knew her then, when she used her given last name of Mayerhofer, say she described herself variously as Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European and supported then-president Barack Obama. The Post initially reported that she had been a registered Democrat as recently as August 2017, but later retracted the claim and issued a correction, blaming an "erroneous voter registration database."

“She would really change who she was based on what fit the situation best at the time,” former roommate Brittany Brooks, who lived with Luna for six months and was a close friend during her military service, said in the report.

Luna graduated from the University of West Florida in 2017 with a degree in biology following a six-year stint in the Air Force, where she met her husband Andrew Gamberzky. After leaving the military she works as a model, a cocktail waitress at a gentleman’s club and an Instagram influencer.

She was ushered into politics by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk after making online statements about human trafficking and the Second Amendment, and she was named that conservative group's director of Hispanic engagement. She ran unsuccessfully for Congress against Rep. Charlie Crist (D-FL) in 2020.

Luna started publicly embracing her Hispanic heritage around that time, and she changed her last name to Luna at age 29, the same year she updated her ethnicity on voter registration records to Hispanic after identifying herself as "White, not of Hispanic origin" in 2015, the Post reported.

Her mother Monica Luna disputed to the Post that her daughter had only recently identified her Mexican ancestry, although she herself only recently took steps to make her own mother's family name part of hers.

“Anna has never not identified as being Hispanic as far as I know,” she wrote in an email, adding that Luna’s father spoke Spanish around her when she was a child. “Anna can check both boxes. She’s bicultural and biracial. It’s not easy to figure out what box to choose.”

Luna's campaign website claims her father was incarcerated off and on throughout her childhood, but the Post was unable to find any public records of felony charges or prison sentences for George Mayerhofer in California, where she lived in those years. Monica Luna and Jolanta Mayerhofer told the newspaper that he was jailed several times for failure to pay child support.

Monica Luna said Mayerhofer, who she never married, served at least a year on a drug-related charge in Orange County, but corrections officials say they have no record of that.

Luna has claimed her father raised her as a Messianic Jew, which her mother corroborated, but her extended family say Mayerhofer was Catholic and they had no recollection of him practicing any form of Judaism.

Her paternal grandfather, Heinrich Mayerhofer, emigrated in 1954 to Canada from Germany, where he served in the Nazi Army as a teenager, though relatives told the Post he had no choice and did not harbor antisemitic views.

“It hurt for him to talk about it,” Jolanta Mayerhofer, who was married to one his sons, told the Post. “He said, ‘You getting the letter, you need to show up, otherwise your life is over. … He did not like it, but that’s what life was.”