'Never Happened': Family of 'Gender Fluid' Ex-Biden Official Speaks Out and Blasts Abuse Claims
Former Biden administration official Sam Brinton’s claims of abuse at the hands of his family are false, according to his sister.
Brinton, who was deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition in the Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy, was charged with two crimes late last year after being accused of stealing luggage in Minneapolis and Las Vegas, according to KMSP-TV.
He then lost his job.
Before his Biden administration gig, Brinton — who describes himself as “gender fluid” and uses the pronouns “they”/”them” — had been a high-profile LGBT activist opposing conversion therapy.
In a 2010 video, he claimed he was abused when he revealed his sexual orientation to his family at the age of 11, according to the Los Angles Blade.
“Dad just started punching,” Brinton said. “That was the first day that I was sent to the emergency room, because I had ‘fallen down the stairs.’ I was sent to the emergency room about six more times for ‘falling down the stairs’ or ‘tripping on the sidewalk.’ I’m in this constant state of fear.”
“My dad has held a gun up to my head multiple times,” he claimed in a YouTube video labeled “True LGBT Stories.”
Brinton further slammed his family in a 2018 Op-Ed in The New York Times.
“My parents were Southern Baptist missionaries who believed that the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion therapy could ‘cure’ my sexuality,” he wrote.
“The therapist ordered me bound to a table to have ice, heat and electricity applied to my body. I was forced to watch clips on a television of gay men holding hands, hugging and having sex. I was supposed to associate those images with the pain I was feeling to once and for all turn into a straight boy,” Brinton said.
The whole thing is a stack of lies, Rachel Brinton told the New York Post.
“There’s no validity to those claims,” she said, according to the report Sunday.
“First of all, the claims of conversion therapy never happened, nor did my parents abuse my brother or I. My parents and I have always known the truth but we don’t preach to people what the truth is. It’s disheartening because my parents are still being slandered for the past decade because some people believed Samuel’s words,” she said.
His mother, Peggy Jo Brinton, also told the Post the conversion therapy story was bunk.
“I’ve never signed him up to have any conversion therapy and that’s pretty much the only comment I can give on that because he needs to tell his own story,” she said.
“We did not abuse him. If he had been in an emergency room at any time, there would be records … and there are none,” she said.
The Post reported that police in Perry, Iowa, where the Brintons lived, said they had no record of complaints related to domestic incidents.
“I’m not going to judge my brother and I’m always going to love and support him,” Rachel Brinton said. “My mom and dad raised me to love and forgive, to understand and be patient. We are human, though, so we have our tears, but you have to have a bigger heart.”
Parents show sue for slander. This minimizes people that are actually abused if these claims aren’t true.
— Abetterway (@nyhoopcoach) February 19, 2023
Wayne Besen had noted some holes in the story in a December Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Blade. He said when he sought to research Brinton’s story, he was never given information to say where the alleged conversion therapy abuse took place, leading him to suspect it was fiction.
Besen said believing Brinton would require someone “to suspend reality.”
He said the media’s swallowing of the tale was part of the problem.
“The media is also culpable in this scandal. In countless stories not a single reporter, from the world’s top publications, pressed Brinton to name their counselor. What kind of journalism is this?” he wrote, using Brinton’s preferred pronoun.
“Not once did they ask them, ‘How do you justify crisscrossing the world to ban conversion therapy, yet you won’t lift a finger stop your own therapist, who was far more egregious? Are you not concerned he’s out there still torturing kids?'” Besen said.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
