The story people remember is that Lauren Boebert got kicked out of a musical. That part is funny and it's over.

The part that matters is what she said afterward, and how long she kept saying it.

On Sunday, September 10, 2023, Boebert and a guest were escorted out of a performance of Beetlejuice at Denver's Buell Theatre. Over the next five days she gave the public three different accounts of that evening. The first was a joke. The second was a denial. The third was an apology, issued only after a security camera made the first two impossible to hold.

What the theater wrote down that night

Denver7 and Scripps News obtained the venue's incident report. It is not a summary written after the story blew up — it's the ushers' contemporaneous account.

Boebert was accused of "vaping, singing, causing a disturbance" during the show. Ushers went to speak with her after complaints from people sitting nearby. She wasn't in her seat, so they waited for her to come back.

Here is the usher, in the report:

"I informed them that our usher team had noticed vaping and also they were causing a disturbance for the area with noise, singing, using their cell phone and they need to be respectful to their neighbors."

The report says Boebert was "argumentative," and that she and her guest were warned that another problem would get them removed. Several minutes into the second act, staff got another complaint: she was being loud and, at that moment, recording — which theaters do not allow.

A security manager was alerted. Denver police were called. An usher asked the pair to step outside and, the report says, they refused. Told they would be trespassing if they stayed, they refused again. When the usher said police would have to be brought in, the answer was "go get them."

According to a Denver police officer's own incident report, one of them said something along the lines of "do you know who I am" and "I will be contacting the mayor" before finally agreeing to go.

Version one: a joke

When the story surfaced two days later, Boebert posted about it — and left out essentially all of it.

"It's true, I did thoroughly enjoy the AMAZING Beetlejuice at the Buell Theatre and I plead guilty to laughing and singing too loud! Everyone should go see it if you get the chance this week and please let me know how it ends!"

She included a link to buy tickets.

"Laughing and singing too loud" is a description of the evening that quietly drops the vaping, the recording, the refusal to leave, the trespassing warning, and the police. It converts a member of Congress being removed by security into a charming story about somebody who loves musicals a bit too much.

Version two: the denial

This is the part that turned it from an embarrassment into a credibility problem.

Her campaign manager, Drew Sexton, told the Denver Post that Boebert had not vaped during the show. She and her staff held that line for most of the week. Everything else — the noise, the phone, the ejection — she was willing to laugh about. The vaping specifically, they said, did not happen.

Vaping is the one item on the list that a camera can settle.

Version three: the camera

On Friday, September 15, the theater released more surveillance footage, first reported by KUSA-TV. It shows Boebert in her seat before the show, with the house lights still up and people settling in around her. She reaches under her seat, brings something to her mouth, and blows out a cloud of vapor.

Her apology came that same day.

"The past few days have been difficult and humbling, and I'm truly sorry for the unwanted attention my Sunday evening in Denver has brought to the community."

She pointed to her divorce as part of the reason, and said, "I simply fell short of my values on Sunday. That's unacceptable and I'm sorry."

Then she explained the denial:

"Whether it was the excitement of seeing a much-anticipated production or the natural anxiety of being in a new environment, I genuinely did not recall vaping that evening when I discussed the night's events with my campaign team while confirming my enthusiasm for the musical. Regardless of my belief, it's clear now that was not accurate; it was not my or my campaign's intention to mislead, but we do understand the nature of how this looks."

Read that carefully. The claim is that she forgot. Not that she was misquoted, not that her staff got ahead of her — that for five days, while her campaign publicly disputed a specific factual allegation on her behalf, she genuinely could not remember doing the thing.

She said she and her team would have to earn back the public's trust.

This was not the first time she gave an account a recording contradicted

Three months earlier, Boebert missed the House vote on the deal to avoid a national default. It was one of the most consequential votes of that Congress; the bill passed the House 314-117 and prevented the government from running out of money to pay its bills. Her Colorado Republican colleague Ken Buck opposed the bill and voted no. Boebert criticized the bill and simply wasn't recorded.

In a video afterward, she described her absence as "a no-show protest" — a deliberate stand. But footage showed her rushing toward the House chamber for the vote, and the statement she filed for the record said she had been "unavoidably detained."

Those two explanations cannot both be true. A protest is a choice. Being unavoidably detained is an accident. She gave one version to her supporters and the other to the official record.

The pattern is the same both times: something happens, she describes it in whatever way flatters her most, and the description holds until a camera or a document makes it untenable.

Why any of this belongs on a report card

A congresswoman vaping at a musical is not a policy failure. Nobody in Colorado's 4th District lost health coverage over it.

What voters are entitled to weigh is whether her account of events is worth anything, because almost everything else she tells them cannot be checked against a security camera.

When she said the removal was about singing, that was checkable. When her campaign said she hadn't vaped, that was checkable. When she called a missed vote a protest, that was checkable. In all three cases the checkable version was not the one she offered first.

And this is not the only apology she has had to issue in office. In 2021, after a video surfaced of her telling a crowd a story that cast Rep. Ilhan Omar — one of the first Muslim women in Congress — as a terrorist, she apologized to the Muslim community. Omar said that when the two spoke by phone, Boebert refused to publicly acknowledge the remarks and "instead doubled down on her rhetoric," so Omar ended the call.

The apology, in each case, arrives after the denial stops working.

Boebert does not hold in-person town halls, telling reporters "it's just not safe to do an in-person town hall because I don't know what to expect." Her constituents get telephone town halls, where the questions are screened, and press statements, where nothing is.

The Buell Theatre had a camera. Most of the time, the people she represents don't.

Source

Denver7's reporting on the venue incident report: Video shows Rep. Lauren Boebert escorted out of 'Beetlejuice' musical after alleged disturbance by Jeff Anastasio. Boebert's apology and the surveillance video: Rep. Boebert apologizes for behavior at 'Beetlejuice' performance, Megan Verlee and The Associated Press, Colorado Public Radio. Image: Denver7/Scripps News.