Two years into his mysterious marriage to a woman—and five years before they divorced—George Santos invited friends to celebrate his engagement to a man, The Daily Beast has learned.
“Good evening everyone! As you all may already know Pedro and I have decided to join our toothbrushes! Lol and a very few friends have been selected to share this special moment with us!” Santos wrote in a 2014 Facebook “engagement dinner” invitation.
The invitation was shared with The Daily Beast by Santos’ old roommate, Greg Morey-Parker, and the boyfriend, Pedro Vilarva, confirmed that the future congressman planned the celebration.
At the time, Santos—who ran for Congress in New York as an “openly gay” Republican—was already married to a Brazilian woman, according to public records. The New York City Marriage Index database shows the couple acquired a marriage license in December 2012, and as The Daily Beast reported last month, they divorced in 2019.
In the invitation, Santos asked guests to “join us on Sunday November 23 at 8:30 pm at La Bonne Soupe” in Manhattan. (Federal filings show that, seven years later, Santos’ campaign committee had spent a combined nearly $1,800 at the restaurant, a block away from Trump Tower.)
“I hope to see everyone [sic] of you there and be sharp and make it count 😉 I know there was no time for an written [sic] invitation but thanks to ‘Facebook’ everyone has a whole weeks [sic] notice! Lmao for all of you that know me I can suck on timing! Thanks for sharing this very important day in our lives! See you all there,” Santos wrote.
Vilarva, who has described his relationship with Santos in previous interviews, told The Daily Beast the engagement party “never happened” because he rejected Santos’ proposals.
“He asked me 3x but I didn’t accept it,” Vilarva wrote in a text. “There was never a party [or] anything in regards to it.”
Santos’ marriage and romantic history first came under scrutiny last month as an astounding series of lies he told about his background—from his education to his mother’s death—began unraveling in the public eye.
After publication of this story, Santos responded to say, “I will not give comment to slanderous accusations made by a person of the likes of Gregory.” The ex-wife, Uadla Vieira Santos, has not responded to questions from The Daily Beast.
Morey-Parker also told The Daily Beast that Santos at one point “tried to get me to marry some Brazilian woman so she could get citizenship.” Morey-Parker, who is openly gay, said Santos told him he could make money from the deal.
Court records in Queens County show that Santos’ ex-wife first filed for divorce in May 2013, and requested judicial intervention a month later. The case was discontinued that December, according to the records, but about six years later, in September 2019, the divorce went through uncontested, The Daily Beast first reported in December.
Less than two weeks after the divorce was finalized, Santos filed the official paperwork to launch his 2020 campaign.
Although Santos’ 2022 campaign bio mentions a husband—who according to Santos was living with him and their four dogs on Long Island—the aspiring public servant kept his previous marriage to a woman a secret during both of his congressional campaigns.
“I am openly gay, have never had an issue with my sexual identity in the past decade, and I can tell you and assure you, I will always be an advocate for LGBTQ folks,” Santos told USA Today last October, in response to criticism about his support for Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay Bill” signed into law last year by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Despite his marriage to a woman, friends knew Santos, who also used the alias Anthony Devolder, to be gay.
“Anthony had more boyfriends than I can remember!” said Morey-Parker, who said he went on one date with Santos and shared screenshots of Facebook messages from 2013 in which Santos was hitting on him.
“I’m a gay Republican—a Reagan Republican, but I did vote for Trump in 2016. Can you imagine how he’s making the Log Cabin Republicans feel? He’s making all of us look bad,” Morey-Parker said.
A second former roommate, Yasser Rabello, said he lived with Santos in New York in 2013 and 2014, after Santos’ wife had first filed for divorce. But the marriage was unknown to Rabello. He claimed that Santos introduced him to the woman just once, but only identified her as “a friend,” adding that he “never knew” about the marriage until The Daily Beast broke the news late last month.
Both men lived with Santos at the same time, in what they described as a crowded and at times chaotic apartment in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in Queens. Among their roommates were Santos, his mother, and his sister, with other people coming and going, the men said, noting that Santos’ legal wife was living in Astoria, in another part of Queens.
“It was a difficult situation,” Rabello said. “There was always a lot of people there, with one bathroom to share with everybody. When I moved out, I wrote a letter to the landlord and told him how many people were living there. Later on, they were kicked out from that building.”
Both Rabello and Morey-Parker previously told Patch that Santos stole from them, and Vilarva, the ex-boyfriend, told The New York Times he believes Santos pawned his cellphone while they lived together in New York.
“I really don’t care about material stuff, but he stole something that really had sentimental value to me,” Morey-Parker told The Daily Beast, in reference to a scarf he says Santos purloined and later wore to a “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C.
“I had tried to kill myself, and my friend gave me that scarf and hat, and she was like, ‘Now you have something physical to touch and know people love you,’” Morey-Parker said, adding that he had texted Santos while in treatment, and that Santos had known about the gift’s significance. “Watching him wear that scarf that means quite a lot to me just pisses me the fuck off.”
Rabello told The Daily Beast that Santos had introduced him to Vilarva as his boyfriend during a 2014 visit to Florida, where Rabello, a pharmacist, had relocated. He said Santos had always seemed like a “pathological liar,” and shared old Facebook messages where Santos claimed he had landed a job at CNN.
Santos, who won a congressional seat in November, has seen his past lies and secrets come cascading down around him following a December exposé in The New York Times. The reports have raised serious questions about the sources of his personal income, his campaign finance statements, ties to an investor with Russian connections, and unresolved criminal fraud charges in Brazil—as well as false claims about his previous employment, his “Jew-ish” heritage, his mother’s presence inside the World Trade Center on 9/11, and money raised through an unregistered pet charity.
Those stories, among a slew of other scandals, have reportedly led to investigations into the congressman at the federal, state, and local levels. But with no immediate constitutional recourse available, voters, donors, and officials in both parties have been left to clamor for his resignation—calls Santos has so far resisted.
This week, GOP House leadership awarded him seats on the Science and Small Business committees.
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