Former Biden Department of Energy official Sam Brinton claims to have been beaten by their father, who held a gun to their head and forced them into conversion therapy — but their family insist it is all lies.
The non-binary nuclear engineer is best known for allegedly stealing women’s suitcases worth thousands of dollars and their contents from Minneapolis and Nevada airports in brazen caught-on-camera heists.
But Brinton, 35, was first championed — and then heavily questioned — by the trans community over harrowing tales of their childhood.
“I’m in this constant state of fear,” Brinton previously claimed. “My dad has held a gun up to my head multiple times.”
Brinton also claimed they were continuously punched and sent to the emergency room at least seven times after they came out at 11 years old and sent to a conversion therapist in Florida, where they were electrocuted and tortured with needles.
However, younger sister Rachel Brinton told The Post her Southern Baptist missionary parents, Stephen and Peggy Jo, never exhibited any violence toward her, Sam or their younger brother Daniel.
“There’s no validity to those claims,” Rachel, 34, said. “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.”
Peggy Jo also maintains she and her husband did not send their eldest child to conversion therapy in Florida as Sam claimed in a 2018 New York Times op-ed.
“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,” Peggy Jo told The Post.
As far as claims that her husband put Sam in an emergency room seven times, Peggy Jo 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.”
The police department in Perry, Iowa, where Sam grew up with their family said their records go back to 1994 and there is “nothing relating to child, elderly abuse and or a domestic dispute” at the family residence or related to any of the family. They said the only report they had of Sam was related to a 2004 car accident.
Nevertheless, Brinton gained worldwide recognition as a conversion therapy survivor and helped launch “50 Bills 50 States” in 2017, a grassroots campaign that aimed to implement laws against conversion therapy across the country.
When asked by NBC in 2017 about their alleged abuse under the hands of a therapist, Brinton said, “They were seven King James Bibles on a stack on the coffee table,” and added the office was in a strip mall in Orlando, Fla. To date, Brinton has not publicly revealed the name of the facility or therapist who allegedly abused them.
Brinton — an MIT graduate — was tapped by the White House in Jan. 2022 to serve as the deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy.
Chairman of the Senate GOP Conference, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), said in December that the Energy Department needed to look into its “failed security clearance process” and how it vetted Brinton.
However, after their grand larceny charges came to light late last year, Brinton was placed on leave and eventually fired from their post. They face up to five years in prison in the Minnesota theft and up to 10 years in the Las Vegas case.
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