(Posted June 8, 2022, on azcentral.com)
By Ronald J. Hansen
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.
“The events in question happened nearly 40 years ago and are part of a dark time in my past when I was married to an abusive, con-artist ex-husband who often threatened to kill me and steal our young daughter,” she said in a statement. “I am thankful everyday that I was able to not only survive, but thrive. Other women have not been as lucky. I cannot believe that the Arizona Republic continues to revictimize me by bringing up this terrible situation.”
In 2020, The Republic reported on a 1988 misdemeanor criminal charge against her in Texas that was later dropped, and a pair of bankruptcies in Arizona.
Lesko acknowledged the Texas case in written answers to The Republic at the time and declined an interview about her past. She didn’t mention Scottsdale police took handwriting samples from her in 1985 to consider her role in a lengthy fraud scheme by her husband. That brush with police happened soon after she gave birth to her first child.
In 2020, she put up a website, leskofacts.com, when she faced scrutiny over her past. She took down the website after she was reelected, and it appears to have remained down in periodic checks since then.
Her ex-husband, now 63, is in an Arizona prison for subsequent fraud convictions and is soon slated to be released. Incarcerated under the name Jeffrey Herald, he maintains that he never abused Lesko, and that she participated in the Scottsdale scheme that resulted in his first Arizona prison stint.
‘A long journey and I’ve come a long way’
These days, Lesko helps recruit conservative women across the country to run for Congress. In 2021, she was among the House Republicans who voted to set aside the election results in Arizona. She recently showed support at the Arizona Legislature for a movie doubling down on false claims of a stolen election.
Her growing national profile owes in part to former President Donald Trump making her part of his congressional defense team during his first impeachment trial.
Last year, at least one of her GOP colleagues suggested to reporters that Lesko could be considered for the party’s No. 3 position after Republicans deposed Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who had become a prominent Trump critic.
Lesko has often characterized her ascent as hard to believe.
In a September 2020 interview with the conservative Daily Signal, Lesko described her path to Congress this way:
“This was a long journey and I’ve come a long way,” she said. “I used to be married to an abusive ex-husband who threatened my life multiple times and so, thankfully, I left that relationship and married a great new husband who I’ve been married to for a long time and had more children.
“But it was rough. It was rough along the way. The last thing on my mind was being a congresswoman, I’ll tell you that. I was just trying to make a living and support my young daughter because I was a single mom.”
Court, business and property records provide details about the past of a woman whose journey to Washington was longer and more improbable than her supporters might have guessed when they first elected her to Congress in April 2018.
She was married for eight years to a career criminal born as Jeffrey Ignas, who later used aliases including the surnames of Stallcup, Baron and Harris.
Ruth Glenn, the CEO of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said Lesko’s experience is not unusual for those in abusive relationships. Glenn’s own violent marriage only ended after 13 years when her then-husband shot her and left her for dead.
“Every victim has experienced it differently,” she said.
Herald on the move across the country
The relationship began in the Milwaukee area in the mid-1980s, not long after she graduated as Debra Lorenz in 1981 from the University of Wisconsin with a bachelor’s degree in business.
She met Herald in July 1984 when she was taking graduate classes at Marquette University and working as a bank officer, according to court records. According to two people who knew her from her time with Herald, he swept her away from another man over her parents’ disapproval.
Lorenz quickly learned Herald had criminal fraud charges against him in Wisconsin and Colorado. But she saw him as a good salesman whose laborers repeatedly drained him of money, leaving him too cash-strapped to finish some of his work, court documents show.
“I know that he did not intentionally try to steal anyone’s money. I was there!” Lorenz wrote in a 1988 court letter seeking leniency for Herald.
Police in cities across the country had a different view.
His life of crime began in 1979, when Herald, a high school dropout mostly raised in Florida, was charged with passing worthless checks in Miami.
He followed his father into the fence-building business but didn’t always follow through on the work. Less than a year after his first charge, Miami police arrested him on grand theft charges that involved nearly three dozen would-be customers.
Miami police described Herald’s fraud operation in 1980 in a way that still applied years later.
“He was running what basically appears to be an advance-fee scheme,” police told the Miami Herald in 1980. “He advertised in the paper, people would call him up, he’d go out to their homes, give a free estimate — of course, demand a deposit — and then do no work. It was very simple.”
After a 60-day jail term, Herald got married and headed to Santa Ana, Calif., where the Los Angeles Times reported he was involved in a three-man fraud ring in July 1981. Court records show authorities shortened Herald’s jail term for forgery after he helped convict other inmates who beat him behind bars.
By 1983, Herald had several fraud-related charges in Colorado, with 38 customers saying they paid for contracting work he didn’t do, according to court records. He also operated a fencing business in Wisconsin that was running into problems in 1984.
In a biographical document that was among his legal papers, Herald, who was married and had two children, claimed he had had a heart attack and nervous breakdown in May 1984. Two months later, he met Lorenz.
Through the summer and fall of 1984, Herald scammed at least 45 different people in the Milwaukee area, a police investigation later found. As usual, according to police records, he took money and didn’t do the work.
Lorenz knew of his problems.
“He had taken the customers’ downpayments, used them for the business and really tried to complete the jobs, but ran out of money,” Lorenz wrote in a letter to a judge in 1988. “I know, because I quit my job (as a banker) to try to help him.”
Herald faced two dozen criminal charges when he skipped court in Wisconsin in January 1985 and became a fugitive.
“We ran out of money for lawyers and because of apparent injustices, we fled, which we now realize was stupid, but at the time seemed the only thing to do,” she wrote years later.
About the time they left Wisconsin and moved to Arizona, Lorenz was pregnant.
Starting over in Arizona: Abuse, loan issues
Police records show Herald and Lorenz opened a bank account in Arizona in April 1985 under the names Jeffrey and Debra Harris. Two months later, Herald received a business loan eventually worth $35,000 using bogus tax records, Scottsdale police records show.
A bank official told investigators “that all the documents presented to him were legitimate looking. They were prepared in a very complete and detailed manner.” The banker also noted that Lorenz “had previous work experience in a bank.”
In July 1985, not long before Herald needed to begin repayment, a Florida account in Lorenz’s name received $1,900 from the loan account. She later told judges in letters that he sent money to his mother to pay a bondsman in Colorado who pocketed the money even though the courts didn’t take it from the bondsman.
Court records show the couple also purchased cellphones in an era when few had them and rang up big phone bills, among other expenses that sometimes went unpaid. In all, authorities estimated total losses to the banks and other businesses dealing with the couple at the time at more than $60,000.
In 2020, Lesko told The Republic she faced even worse problems.
“The abuse began early on in our relationship,” she said. “I remember a specific incident, late in my pregnancy with my daughter, when he punched the hell out of me in the stomach. It was so horrible; I could have lost my baby. The abuse continued from there.”
Herald denies ever abusing Lorenz. In a March email to The Republic, he wrote, “In the past and my younger days I was a piss poor citizen to society, but not to Debra and I am nothing like that now or what Debra says I am.”
By mid-September 1985, with Lorenz days from giving birth, she deepened her ties to him. On Sept. 12, 1985, his first marriage formally ended in divorce. Two days later, he married Lorenz in a small ceremony in Mesa. By then, he had missed payments on the business loan.
The bank scrutinized its clients more closely and discovered their names, their business, its location and its phone number were all bogus, according to police records.
Once the police became involved, they learned Herald, using several aliases, was wanted in multiple states.
Lorenz had her own problems.
Police noted “Deborah K. Harris” wrote a check on a closed account for $30 to Woman to Woman Clinic. She was trying to schedule her doctor’s presence for the birth of her child, records show.
After discussing the matter with police, the doctor cooperated with the investigation.
The day after Lorenz gave birth to their daughter, officers went to Mesa Lutheran Hospital and found Herald at his wife’s side.
Records note that he was “somewhat combative” as police arrested him. “He was very nervous and shook greatly,” the reports said. He told Lorenz what was happening and was taken to jail.
“He kept asking how we had found him and if his parents had turned him over to us,” police noted in their reports.
For her part, Lorenz later complained of what she viewed as police excess.
“The detective gave me a very nasty ‘Congratulations baby card,’” she wrote.
The police investigation implicated Lorenz as well.
“It was also ascertained from various witnesses that the suspect’s girlfriend, Debra Lorenz, also known as Debra Harris, also known as Debra Howard, has accompanied the suspect on many of the purchases and has signed many of the checks as well as the papers for securing loans, etc.,” police records show. “She has made overt statements that she was the bookkeeper for the company, and has signed fictitious letters of character reference.”
Five witnesses picked Lorenz out of a photo lineup as the woman involved in the business at the center of Herald’s fraud.
Lorenz, 26 at the time, reported to Scottsdale police a week later to provide a handwriting sample but declined to be interviewed by investigators, records show. A detective with the documents lab for the state police later viewed her sample as a “positive identification” for other business documents signed under a different name.
Lorenz was never charged in the case. She was viewed as a material witness to her husband’s case and had a lawyer named to defend her interests while the court processed him.
Herald remained in jail until Dec. 22, 1985, when authorities cut his bail to $15,000 from $822,000. The bail had been set that high because of his prior record in Florida and California and warrants in Colorado and Wisconsin.
The Phoenix-area minister who performed their marriage ceremony in September said he took in Lorenz for days after the arrest and helped Herald get out of jail by posting part of his bail just before Christmas.
On Feb. 18, 1986, Herald reached a verbal plea agreement with prosecutors later referenced in court records. The assistant county attorney agreed “no new charges on existing or acknowledged crimes would be brought against the defendant and his wife for a guilty plea.”
Herald remembers it this way: “She was booked in Scottsdale … but was released as I took the blame for her extravagance life style she wanted to live,” he wrote in an email to The Republic. “The reason I took the blame for her, we just had a new born and she told me in the future she would make it up to me.”
In March 1986, days before Herald was set to be sentenced in Arizona, Lorenz wrote to his judge asking for a sentence that didn’t include prison.
“I feel without trying to brag, that I am a good influence on Jeff’s life,” she said.
Law enforcement authorities were less hopeful. A pre-sentence report noted Herald had moved around a lot and found trouble at each stop.
“In every state he has resided as an adult there have been felony charges filed against him,” the report said. His extensive criminal record suggested to authorities that prison, not probation, was in order.
With prison in Arizona looming, and with Herald still wanted in Wisconsin and Colorado on theft charges, and probation violations in Florida and California, he and Lorenz took their 6-month-old daughter and moved to New Mexico.
Trying again in New Mexico
They settled in Albuquerque. The couple took over the mortgage payment for a house owned by others and, briefly, scratched out lives that kept them out of further trouble.
“When he worked for another company in Albuquerque, New Mexico he made a good living, was promoted, and had no legal problems,” Lorenz wrote about that period in a letter to a judge years later.
By early 1987, Herald and Lorenz tried their hand with a company, called A-AA Sign Co., an alphabetic combination they used in other business ventures as well. He was the corporate president; she was the company’s secretary and treasurer.
Business records show that in January 1987 they filed papers to incorporate — using aliases — on the same day they began receiving loans totaling $30,000, ostensibly to help them make a sign for a Holiday Inn.
They intended to buy equipment for the new business with the loans and use it as collateral for the debt. Shortly after receiving the first of two loans, they bought $2,200 worth of carpeting, drapes and rods for their home, according to a lien later filed in the matter.
In March 1987, with $30,000 in loan payments due, the couple created another company with the same name in Texas. They eventually paid the New Mexico bank $14,000 but defaulted on the rest, which ran to $19,000 with interest.
Meanwhile, their New Mexico sign company filed for bankruptcy in May 1987.
With the couple out of state, the Albuquerque home was later foreclosed.
Civil judgments in Texas
The new start in Texas soon came with familiar problems.
In August 1987, a Texas judge saddled Herald’s Texas-based sign company with a $34,000 judgment from Outdoor Systems Inc., the then-Phoenix-based outdoor advertising company. One of Outdoor’s top executives at the time, Arturo Moreno, later bought the Los Angeles Angels baseball team and became a prominent Trump supporter.
Two weeks after the judgment, a judge ordered Herald and Lorenz to pay the New Mexico bank $19,000 for the delinquent business loans in that state.
A month later, the couple bought a mobile home in Conroe, Texas. They started another business.
By February 1988, Herald was caught writing bad checks in Texas and was tagged with a $6,000 judgment owed to a newspaper.
The same day, Lorenz was at the center of an odd property transaction.
Using her maiden name of Lorenz, she purchased a mobile home lot in Conroe from James and Debra Schultz, the aliases she and her husband were using at the time. Property records suggest she acted as a notary public for a portion of the transaction involving herself and a family member, something that is legal in Texas but discouraged.
Herald was convicted in the misdemeanor bad-checks case and was sent back to Arizona, where he was a fugitive for fleeing sentencing in his 1985 felony fraud convictions.
Lorenz followed him there.
In March 1988, she again asked a judge for mercy on Herald, saying that in 1985 the Scottsdale detective had repeatedly told Herald his then-newborn daughter would be a teenager before he would get out of prison. That, along with what she viewed as poor legal representation, scared them both.
“We now realize that leaving was a big mistake and felt very guilty about leaving when the reverend had helped us so much,” Lorenz wrote, referencing the local minister who had helped them both after Herald was arrested at the hospital. She noted “Jeff & I” want to “pay everyone back, including the reverend’s $2,000.”
That minister told The Republic she reached out to him and his wife about that time — not to repay them, but to ask for more money. He declined.
“We’ve already done more than we should have,” he recalled of that brief conversation, which was the last time they ever spoke.
Lorenz had a new problem at the time. Authorities in Conroe charged her in April 1988 with a misdemeanor accusing her of destroying government records. The type of records are not identified in the few surviving documents on the case. In 2020, Lesko said she could not recall what that allegation involved.
Prosecutors dropped the case in 1994, saying it was “in the best interest of justice due to the age of these cases, unavailability of witnesses, low probability of conviction, and nature of the offenses.”
Two weeks after she was charged in 1988, authorities foreclosed on the mobile home in Texas.
In June 1988, Herald was sentenced in Arizona to 10 years behind bars for the 1985 fraud case. Authorities in Wisconsin agreed to drop the charges against him on the condition that he pay $4,700 in restitution to those he had cheated.
Another go in Arizona
With her husband in prison, Lorenz advocated for his early release.
In March 1989, Lorenz asked a judge to cut her husband’s prison sentence, saying she was raising their daughter on her own while battling other jurisdictions over Herald’s prior troubles.
“I do all of this and stay with Jeff because I feel he is basically a good person and not criminally oriented,” she wrote. Lorenz noted her frustration at news accounts of “people who have killed others or stolen much larger amounts of money and have received less time in prison than Jeff.”
“That doesn’t seem fair to me,” Lorenz wrote.
Ten days later, she formed a business, identified in records as AAA Fence Co.
Herald was released from prison in January 1992 and moved in with Lorenz and their daughter.
Within months, however, financial woes and business troubles surfaced again.
In October, the couple filed for bankruptcy. A week after they did so, a Scottsdale customer filed a complaint against AAA Fence Co. with the state Registrar of Contractors. Two months later, the state terminated the company’s business license. But that didn’t end the complaints.
Over the next 16 months, 16 other complaints were filed against the company with the state agency. It is unclear from the records whether the promised work was done poorly or not done at all.
Sixteen of the 17 complaints led to payouts from the state’s recovery fund in decisions that stretched into mid-1996.
In early 1993, Lorenz and Herald faced a pair of lawsuits from creditors, each wanting more than $10,000. In May 1993, the couple filed a second bankruptcy case. It appeared to be the end of their relationship as well.
Two days after filing the second case, Lorenz sought a court order to prevent Herald from taking their daughter out of state, as she said he had threatened to do. A day later, she moved to Glendale, away from Herald.
By June 1993, Herald was accused of more fraud that eventually would send him back to prison in Arizona.
In September, Lorenz filed for divorce. By November, a judge ordered Herald behind bars.
The divorce was finalized in late December. Lorenz married her current husband, Joe Lesko, a week after that. Soon after, she gave birth to a child with Lesko.
A personal turnaround
From there, Debbie Lesko’s life traced the more familiar path known to her supporters. She became active in her children’s schools and helped convince a neighborhood to construct a wall to drown out a busy intersection.
In 2006, she launched her elective career by running for the school board in Peoria. In an interview with The Republic at the time, she cited her qualifications this way:
“I am a hard worker. I am honest. I question things. I listen to people,” she said. “I’m not a person that sits idly by and waits for other people to take action. If I truly believe in something, I will get involved. … I’m a person who gets things accomplished.”
About the same time, Lesko was a founding director of the Arizona Federation of Taxpayers Association, a group with ties to David Koch, the late conservative billionaire who advocated for low-tax policies.
She also wrote several columns for The Republic, including one in 2008 in which she acknowledged she was a victim of domestic violence and discussed why women often stay with their abusers.
One reason, she wrote, is shame.
“The shame of people thinking you were stupid to get involved. The shame of admitting that you, a smart person, put up with the things that you do. The shame that people won’t understand why you stay.”
She also said that such victims also cling to hope things will improve and harbor fear of attacks if they leave.
When Herald was out of her life, Lesko’s fortunes soared. In 2008, she won a seat in the Arizona Legislature, where she remained until running for Congress in 2018.
Lesko’s story of survival, and her status as a woman in a Washington still largely dominated by men, has drawn praise.
In the 2020 Phoenix Christian podcast, the host, Jeff Blake, the superintendent at the school, thanked Lesko “for being a champion for truth and liberty and justice, and in particular in this conversation, as a father of two beautiful girls, a champion for women.”
“Well, I am proud to do it. I’m honored to do it,” she said, before mentioning her opposition to a Democratic bill that would “give priority to transgenders over women and girls.”
On the podcast, she also reflected on her life with Herald.
“There was good times, but the bad times definitely outweighed the good times,” she said. “He had threatened to kill me multiple times. After I finally decided to leave him, I looked back and go, ‘Why the heck did I do that? I’m an intelligent person.’
“I don’t know why I did that. And I still don’t know to this day why I stuck with him. I think it’s a combination of wanting to be loyal, and stick with your husband, and there were some good times. My advice to women, and anyone if you’re in an abusive relationship: Quite frankly, get out of it. Life is going to get better. … Look at what happened to my life.”
If you need help, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 or www.thehotline.org.
