A newly surfaced report is raising serious questions about Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perezs conduct and judgment during her years at Reed College, just as the first-term Democrat faces a highly competitive reelection fight in Washingtons 3rd Congressional District.
According to The Post Millennial, the allegations draw heavily on archived student government documents, podcasts, and interviews with former classmates and roommates, and they paint a picture of a lawmaker whose past behavior sits uneasily with the working-class, moderate image she now promotes. The timing is politically significant, coming as Gluesenkamp Perez confronts what is expected to be the most difficult campaign of her career in a district that has leaned Republican in recent presidential contests.
As reported by The Post Millennial, citing the New York Post, Gluesenkamp Perez served as a student senator at Reed College and chaired the schools finance committee in 2012, overseeing the allocation of student funds. During her tenure, the student government approved roughly $4,000 to underwrite a campus "Latex Fetish Ball," an event hosted by the colleges Fetish Club.
The Fetish Club, according to the report, offered workshops on bondage techniques and other fetish-related activities, raising questions about why a future member of Congress was comfortable directing student funds toward such programming. Gluesenkamp Perez also backed funding for Reeds annual Renn Fayre, a raucous campus festival known for nude runs by body-painted students and a party culture far removed from the values of many families in Southwest Washington.
The New York Post further reported that the student government promoted an "LSD giveaway" and "Nitrogen Day," events that appeared to embrace Reed Colleges longstanding reputation for permissive drug use. The campus had already attracted national scrutiny for student-written drug guides that discussed substances such as LSD, psilocybin, cocaine, ketamine, and nitrous oxide, or whippets, underscoring a culture of experimentation that critics say Gluesenkamp Perez helped normalize rather than challenge.
Beyond her official roles, former roommate Isaac Eger described troubling personal behavior during an episode of the COEXIST, Inc. podcast, alleging that Gluesenkamp Perez lived in housing he provided after a breakup but repeatedly refused to pay rent. When he pressed her for payment, Eger recalled, she once tried to settle her debt with rotten groceries: "The kind of avocado where you can't even turn it into guacamole or anything. And she's like, 'here's rent,'" he said. "And I was like, uh, no, absolutely not."
"She would literally never pay rent," he added, suggesting a pattern of irresponsibility that contrasts sharply with the fiscal discipline many voters expect from their representatives. Eger also claimed that Gluesenkamp Perez was an avid dumpster diver and recounted an incident in which she decapitated a chicken during an urban farming experiment while roommates frantically searched online for a humane method of slaughter.
Investigative journalist Dan Boguslaw, a fellow Reed alumnus, alleged in a separate report cited by the outlet that Gluesenkamp Perez sold low-quality marijuana from a van, adding another layer to the portrait of a future congresswoman immersed in fringe campus subcultures. For conservatives, such accounts reinforce concerns that progressive elites often emerge from insular academic environments with values and habits far removed from the everyday experiences of their constituents.
The political stakes are substantial. Earlier this year, Inside Elections shifted its rating of Washingtons 3rd Congressional District from "Tilt Democratic" to "Toss Up," noting that Gluesenkamp Perez faces persistent discontent among Democratic base voters in a district President Donald Trump carried by about three percentage points in 2024. The outlet wrote that "Democratic representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has ongoing issues with her base that won't prevent her from getting through the top 2 primary, but it could make her race against state senator John Braun a little less comfortable in a district where Trump finished ahead of Kamala by three points."
That warning was reinforced by a recent co/efficient poll showing Republican State Sen. John Braun leading Gluesenkamp Perez 41 percent to 34 percent in a hypothetical general election matchup. The same survey found her unfavorable rating at 50 percent and revealed that she commands the support of only 69 percent of Democratic voters, a worrying sign for an incumbent in a swing district.
Republicans have seized on these vulnerabilities, highlighting campaign finance disclosures indicating that roughly 81 percent of Gluesenkamp Perezs contributions originate from outside Washington state. Critics argue that such numbers suggest she is more beholden to national liberal donors than to local families, and they have also faulted her for remaining silent while Democrats in Olympia advanced an income tax proposal during this years legislative session.
Gluesenkamp Perez, who first captured the seat in 2022 by defeating Republican Joe Kent, has consistently tried to brand herself as a pragmatic, blue-collar Democrat attuned to the concerns of tradesmen and rural voters. The emerging accounts from her Reed College yearsfeaturing fetish balls, drug-themed events, alleged rent-dodging, and bizarre urban farming experimentsnow threaten to undercut that carefully crafted persona, giving Braun and other conservatives fresh ammunition as they argue that the district deserves a representative whose life experience and values more closely mirror those of the community.
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