Three days after President Trump announced his “Complete and Total Endorsement” of the Louisiana congressional candidate Blake Miguez, the Republican contender posted a video from outside the West Wing boasting of his close relationship with Trump and his team. “I just got done having some great meetings with the White House,” he told his supporters on February 7.
What he did not say—either publicly or to Trump’s advisers at the time—was that there was a political bombshell about to drop on his campaign for Louisiana’s deep-red Fifth Congressional District. Months earlier, when Miguez was running for the U.S. Senate, a 2007 police report had surfaced that showed that Miguez’s former girlfriend had accused him of rape and other abusive behavior, including locking her in bedrooms, taking away her keys, and holding her down. The Miguez campaign denies the claims.
In the report, which I obtained, the woman described to police how Miguez had sex with her even though she told him no, and then followed her when she fled the home. She told police that she’d hidden behind a car near a convenience store until a friend could join her, then called 911. An officer took her to a hospital for a rape-kit examination, the report stated. Miguez, who was then 25 years old, was detained and questioned. After the woman, then 22, told a detective that she did not want to press charges, none were filed. “I called 911 cause I honestly was/am scared!” she wrote in a voluntary statement to the police.
The police report has put the president in a difficult position, because Trump has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault and was found liable for sexual abuse in a New York civil trial. The president has denied any wrongdoing. Two people familiar with the White House endorsement process told me that Trump’s top advisers were not informed of the police report or the rape accusation before the president endorsed. That has raised concerns that Miguez either wasn’t fully vetted or wasn’t forthcoming about discoverable documents from his past. The report has been circulating in Louisiana for months, according to people familiar with the effort to uncover it, and last fall, a private investigator requested public records related to the woman that have since been used to try to undermine her credibility.
“It has been widely discussed amongst the political crowd that there was a massive bomb,” one Republican who works in the state told me about the rumors. “Nobody knew what it was.”
The Club for Growth, a conservative group that is involved in Republican primaries in safe House seats, endorsed Miguez a day earlier than the president and continues to support him. A spokesperson for the group, Joe Kildea, declined to say whether officials knew about the rape allegation ahead of its endorsement and told me that the group was aware of what he called “false accusations made 20 years ago” and does not find them credible.
The White House press office declined to comment.
Miguez, a champion sharpshooter and a former reality-show contestant, has served in the Louisiana legislature since 2015, most recently as a state senator. He announced a campaign last year to challenge Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, who earned Trump’s ire by voting to convict him for impeachment in 2021. After Trump decided earlier this year to endorse Representative Julia Letlow in that primary, Miguez pivoted to run for Letlow’s open congressional seat, a rural expanse that wraps the state’s border with Mississippi, which is about 40 miles from the parish where Miguez has long lived.
The Miguez campaign pointed me to a February 24 email that the accuser’s father sent to Miguez’s state-Senate office after he was contacted by an Associated Press reporter asking about the accusations. The father told Miguez he could share the email, the campaign told me.
“The only thing I told him were that you are a good man and you have my vote and everything my daughter has reported about you were lies and she is a liar and has a drug problem,” the accuser’s father wrote. “Not sure why they are digging up this crap but I wanted to give you a heads up.” The email did not refute any of the specifics in the police report, which the father claimed that he’d refused to read when the reporter offered it to him. (I was unable to reach the accuser, whom I am not naming, or her family.)
A campaign spokesperson declined to answer my questions about when Miguez had learned that the police report was circulating or whether he’d told the White House or the Club for Growth about its contents. “We would refer you to an email from the woman’s own father,” the campaign responded in an unsigned statement.
Three days after the email from the accuser’s father was sent, Matthew Foldi, a former Republican candidate for the U.S. House, published an article on his Substack that described the unearthing of the 2007 police report as a “Kavanaugh-esque smear,” a reference to the accusations of sexual assault that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh faced during his confirmation hearings. (Kavanaugh denied wrongdoing and was confirmed.) Foldi wrote that the Miguez campaign told him, “They know they can’t beat Blake with the truth, so they’re trying to destroy him with lies.” The Associated Press has yet to publish an article about the accusations.
Foldi also nodded to information about the accuser’s interactions with law enforcement in the years since her relationship with Miguez. She sought protective orders against another boyfriend in 2008 and 2011, alleging domestic violence. In 2012, she alleged abuse by a third boyfriend, who told police that she was addicted to pills and had recently been in rehab. In 2014, she was booked for unauthorized entry into a residence and later charged with a felony. She pleaded not guilty, and the case was later dropped. In 2023, she was arrested for child desertion, according to a local news report. The case was not charged or prosecuted, according to court records. Last year, she was arrested when methamphetamine and marijuana were found in the car she was traveling in, and she has pleaded not guilty to the resulting charges. (I have reviewed copies of legal documents related to all of these charges.)
The Club for Growth referenced the woman’s troubled history in their statement to me and accused her of a “long record of fabricated claims” and of making similar allegations against other men. The documents that I reviewed do not show evidence of fabrication on her part and did not include other rape accusations. Kildea did not answer my follow-up questions asking for evidence.
Despite Trump’s endorsement, the Republican primary for Lousiaians’s Fifth District, where Trump won 67 percent of the vote in 2024, remains contested. Other Republican candidates include Michael Echols, a state representative; State Senator Rick Edmond, a pastor at Speaker Mike Johnson’s church; and Misti Cordell, a member of the state Board of Regents. The primary is on May 16.
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