Questions about Marco Rubio’s Gay Arrest- Reported as Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
Rumors that Marco Rubio is gay and was once arrested for being intimate with a man in a park have persisted throughout the Florida senator’s presidential campaign.
The Truth:
We couldn’t find any proof to support the rumor that Marco Rubio is gay, or of Rubio’s so-called “gay arrest” in a Florida park.
Claims that Marco Rubio is gay are based on run-in that Rubio had with police in 1990. Rubio and two other men were reportedly arrested in May 1990 while hanging out in a park located in a high-crime area of Miami after it was closed.
Rubio was arrested and charged with an unknown misdemeanor, but it was later dismissed. The Miami Clerk of Courts Office said Rubio’s case file has since been destroyed. The Washington Post first reported on details or Rubio’s arrest in January 2016:
It was not far from there that Rubio’s arrest occurred. At 9:37 p.m. on Wednesday, May 23, 1990 — five days before Rubio’s 19th birthday and an hour and a half after sunset — a police officer was dispatched to Alice C. Wainwright Park, a shaded stretch of grass along Brickell Avenue where the neighborhoods of Brickell and Coconut Grove meet, according to a Miami police incident report. The park, studded with palms and gumbo limbo trees, offered a stunning vista of Biscayne Bay, a “millionaire’s view for the masses,” according to one newspaper review.
…According to the Miami police incident report, a police officer arrived at the park at 9:47 p.m., 10 minutes after being dispatched. The report notes that Rubio and two other teenagers were inside the park after hours. In a recent interview, Angel Barrios — one of the men arrested with Rubio — said they were sitting in a car when they were approached by an officer.
A spokesperson for Marco Rubio dismissed the run-in as youthful indiscretion. He told the Post that:
“When he was 18 years old, he violated municipal code for drinking beer in a park after hours. He was never taken into custody, never hired a lawyer and never appeared in court. Why the Washington Post thinks this is a story is beyond me.”
But that wasn’t enough to kill rumors about the run-in. Details about Angel Barrios, the man who was arrested along with Marco Rubio, have fueled speculation that Marco Rubio is gay, or was arrested for having sex with a man in the park that night. A post on Pastebin explains the theory:
As a quick summary: we know that the man Rubio was arrested with in 1990 was sued by Miami in 2007 for running a gay pornography studio out of one of his properties. We believe the totality of the evidence strongly implies that Rubio was engaged in sexual relations with that man in 1990, and that’s why they were arrested.
The story, published on January 21st, notes that Rubio was with his friend, Angel Barrios, and another unnamed young man, when they were stopped by the police in Alice C. Wainwright Park at about 10 PM on May 23, 1990. Unfortunately, the article does not give very much information about Mr. Barrios, other than the fact that he owns several coin-operated laundries in the Miami area. So we decided to try and find out who this guy is. His LinkedIn page was easy to find: www.linkedin. com/in/angel-barrios-19387360. Further searches revealed a case filed by the City of Miami against an Angel Barrios in 2007, seeking to enjoin him from allowing the use of his residential property for business purposes. What were these business purposes? The production of pornography for distribution over the internet, by a company named Flava Works. What kind of pornography? Gay pornography…
Those rumors about Angel Barrio’s ties to gay porn can be traced back to a 2007 news report titled
“The House Next Door.” It was reported that a house owned by Barrio’s father had been used to film male models for voyeur website. The men were paid $1,200 a month to live in the house with cameras filming their every move, including group sex acts.
But Angel Barrios told the Miami New Times that reports about his involvement with the activities in the house, and the website, were false. His property management company rented the house to people who ran the website, the New Times reports:
Today Barrios strongly denies he knew anything about the gay smut business. He says his property management company rented the house to Flava Works, the firm behind CocoDorm, with the understanding it was a “digital media” company. He didn’t know the truth, he says, until Channel 6’s report; the next day, Barrios recalls, a Miami Herald reporter knocked on his elderly father’s door to ask about the website.
“We are not in the gay porn business. We are not in the straight porn business. We are not in the porn business,” Barrios says. “My poor father, he had no idea what was going on in there.”
So, it’s true that one of Marco Rubio’s friends from nearly 20 years ago rented a house to someone who used it film gay pornography. But that doesn’t prove that Marco Rubio is gay, or that he was arrested for having sex in park in 1990. That’s why we’re reporting this one fiction.