Anna Paulina Luna tweets.

 

The making of Anna Paulina Luna.

Luna’s sharp turn to the right, her account of an isolated and impoverished childhood, and her embrace of her Hispanic heritage have surprised some friends and family who knew her before her ascent to the U.S. House this year.

Twelve years before she was elected as the first Mexican American woman to represent Florida in Congress, Anna Paulina Luna was serving at Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg, Mo., where friends said she described herself as alternately Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European. Known then by her given last name of Mayerhofer, Luna sported designer clothing and expressed support for then-President Barack Obama.

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By the time she ran for Congress as a Republican, she had changed her last name to Luna in what she said was an homage to her mother’s family. A staunch advocate for gun rights, she cited on the campaign trail a harrowing childhood that left her “battle hardened.”

 She said she and her mother had little extended family as she grew up in “low-income” neighborhoods in Southern California with a father in and out of incarceration.

 She said she experienced a traumatizing “home invasion” when she was serving in the Air Force in Missouri.

Luna’s sharp turn to the right, her account of an isolated and impoverished childhood, and her embrace of her Hispanic heritage have come as a surprise to some friends and family who knew her before her ascent to the U.S. House this year. 

A cousin who grew up with Luna said she was regularly included in family gatherings. 

Her roommate in Missouri had no recollection of the “home invasion” Luna detailed, describing instead a break-in at their shared apartment when they were not home, an incident confirmed by police records.

"She would really change who she was based on what fit the situation best at the time,” said the roommate, Brittany Brooks, who lived with Luna for six months and was a close friend during her military service.

Luna’s congressional office did not provide answers to a detailed list of questions about her biography from The Washington Post. When approached in person on Capitol Hill last week, Luna claimed she had not received any inquiry from The Post and declined to comment further. On Friday, Luna’s communications director, Edie Heipel, emailed The Post calling the questions “bizarre” and stating “our office will not be responding to you any further.”

After the online publication of this story, Luna issued a statement through her attorney that said: “As I’ve said before, and as [The Post] has clearly showcased, anyone who is a conservative minority is a threat to Leftist control. They can try to discredit me, but unfortunately for them the facts completely blow their story out of the water.”

Luna’s persona as a hard-line conservative who overcame steep personal odds helped her flip Florida’s newly redistricted 13th Congressional seat red last year, riding the support of former president Donald Trump to victory over Democratic candidate Eric Lynn. She is part of a new class of House Republicans that includes many elected to public office for the first time, including Rep. George Santos (N.Y.), whose fabrications about his biography emerged after his election.

During her first week in Congress, Luna was part of a small group of Republicans who refused to elect Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as House speaker, before earning major concessions and eventually switching her vote.

Central to Luna’s political identity is a dramatic life story laid out on her campaign website featuring disturbing experiences that left her with “an armor” that prepared her to fight for the American Dream, as she has described it. She says she survived an armed robbery by age 9 and that her grandmother “died of HIV/AIDS contracted from heroin use.” She has asserted at times that her grandmother’s husband and brothers died that way, too.