When Florida congressional candidate John Strand introduces himself to potential voters, he starts with his criminal record. “I’m John Strand, patriot for Congress, the J6 hostage who went to prison on principle so that you don’t have to,” he said at a January debate hosted by the Women’s Republican Club of Naples Federated.
The former international underwear model spent about a year in federal prison after a DC jury convicted him of five criminal counts, including one felony, related to his participation in the January 6 assault on the US Capitol. In January 2025, Trump pardoned him, along with 1,500 people convicted of J6-related crimes. And now, Strand is using his J6 infamy to try to catapult into Congress in one of the weirdest GOP primaries in the country this year.
Of the 10 candidates currently running to fill a seat vacated by Rep. Byron Donalds, who is running to be the GOP candidate for Florida governor, Strand is actually one of two felons pardoned by Trump in the race. The other, former Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY), resigned from Congress in 2019 and pleaded guilty to insider trading and lying to the FBI. He was serving a 20-month prison sentence when Trump pardoned him at the end of his first term.
Joining them is former Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who lost his 2022 primary after being plagued by scandals ranging from sexual harassment allegations to carrying a gun through TSA—twice—and claiming he’d witnessed some of his House colleagues do a “key bump of cocaine” right in front of him. The frontrunner, Catalina Lauf, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2020 and 2022—in Illinois. She lost the 2020 race to former Illinois state senator Jim Oberweis, who is also now running in Florida’s 19th.
To distinguish himself from the pack, Strand has leaned hard on his status as a J6 “hostage” while supplementing his rhetoric with the timeworn GOP campaign tactic of demonizing LGBT people.
“Hostage” is a bit of a stretch. After he was arrested in Beverly Hills a few days after the 2021 attack on the Capitol, Strand opted to go to trial rather than take a plea bargain, as did Simone Gold, the anti-vax doctor he accompanied into the Capitol. Gold was sentenced to only 60 days in prison as a result. Strand got 32 months after a jury found him guilty on all counts. The sentence included extra time for lying on the stand and fundraising off his “49 minutes of infamy” while a court-appointed lawyer represented him.
Strand likes to blame his prison sentence on an “openly biased DC jury,” but the evidence against him was overwhelming. After leaving the Capitol, he literally texted someone, “We stormed the Capitol. It was insane.” Video footage also showed him at the front of the mob, stepping over a fallen US Capitol Police officer on his way into the building with Gold.
As the crowd began to force their way into the Capitol building, Dr. Simone Gold and John Strand were part of the crowd that violently pushed/pulled an officer down the stairs.
— 𝚃𝚘𝚡𝚒𝚌 𝚆𝚘𝚘𝚍𝚎𝚗 𝚆𝚘𝚖𝚊𝚗🌙 (@Autre_Vierge) January 12, 2021
I slowed down/highlighted the pair currently being sought by the FBI.
H/T: @Cineaste_C
🎥: NyPost pic.twitter.com/nf7PGOqwJG
Strand has engaged in some revisionist history to spin this record into a selling point for his congressional candidacy. “I was innocent,” he insists on his campaign website and in ads. “The DOJ vacated every charge.” The judge, however, saw things differently. “This Order does not constitute a finding of innocence,” wrote US District Judge Christopher Cooper in an order dismissing Strand’s case after his pardon. “Nor does it affect the existence of probable cause for Defendant’s arrest and prosecution.”
Hard time clearly isn’t enough substance to drive a congressional campaign, especially in a race featuring more than one former felon. So Strand has adopted another popular MAGA strategy: attacking the LGBTQ community. Strand was homeschooled and raised in a conservative, Christian family. He has seamlessly supplemented his J6 story with Bible references and promises voters a return to “Judeo-Christian values.”
“The enemies of America—both foreign and domestic—are erasing truth, rewriting history, distorting gender, and sexually exploiting our children,” says his campaign website, where he’s portrayed as a “maverick” in a leather jacket like Tom Cruise in Top Gun.
In May last year, Strand joined in a protest in Naples, Florida, to support the city’s decision to ban a drag show from a public park during Pride week. In December, he testified before the Naples City Council to further support city action against Pride events by speaking “some hard truth” about what he learned while working in Hollywood.
“Pride,” he said, putting air quotes around the word, “is a very aggressive, explicitly sexual enterprise with a terribly destructive agenda, confusing, distorting and then destroying the natural and healthy design of human sexuality.” He claimed that the “Pride movement” was “eroding the health and strength of the family unit,” and called it a form of tyranny that features “deviant sexual behaviors.”
Strand, 43, doesn’t always seem to have found the “Pride movement” so toxic. In his memoir, Patriot Plea: The J6 Journey of a Political Prisoner in the Divided States of America, he briefly recounts his years couch-surfing through West Hollywood as a struggling model. But he omits some critical details.
“I met him in a gay bar,” says Loran Morgan, who has known Strand for more than 15 years, speaking about that time. Morgan says back then, Strand had many gay friends. He even attended Morgan’s 2010 birthday party at The Abbey, the “world famous gay bar,” according to its website, where drag shows are a staple, and went back there with Morgan at least one other time, in 2014. Morgan says in 2011, he even secured Strand a job working in an Equinox booth during the Pride Festival in West Hollywood.
Strand’s years modeling underwear also landed him in gay media. In 2012, for instance, he graced the cover of Sensitif, a French gay magazine, and inside, he poses virtually nude. He also modeled skimpy underwear for RUFSKIN, a gay California fashion label. (Strand did not respond to several requests for comment.)
No one I spoke with claims that Strand was gay or engaged in gay sexual acts, but they say he definitely associated with LGBT people and seemed supportive of the community. For about a year starting in August 2011, Strand and his now ex-wife lived with Amy Messigian, a Los Angeles lawyer who let them stay rent-free in her house in exchange for caring for her dog while she was at work. “His group of friends was predominantly gay,” she told me. “He would go out with his boys in West Hollywood. His wife would stay home.”
Messigian had a group of old friends who would regularly meet up socially, and Strand and his wife would often join them. One of those friends, Richard Valois, who works in advertising in Los Angeles, says he and Strand once went out without the group. “He had a place he wanted to go to in West Hollywood because he knew the bartender. It ended up being a gay bar,” Valois told me, noting that he was surprised to end up there because their friend group didn’t go to gay bars. He was even more surprised by Strand’s choice of venue “because he had a wife.”
“I’m not saying he’s gay,” he emphasized. “But when we went there, he knew the bartender. He knew everyone.” He’s mystified by Strand’s current campaign against Pride events and trans rights. “He had no problem with gay people back then, so why is he doing that now?”
In Patriot Plea, Strand says he lost many of his Hollywood friends after he embraced Trump. “I torched my Hollywood career with a Maverick barrel roll into public support for MAGA,” he writes. But his former LA friends say they never knew him to care about politics. “He had this insatiable thirst for fame. All his social media was talking about being famous,” Valois says. “He would post his laps that he did in the pool. That was his whole persona. He was not a political person in any sense of the imagination.”
Strand was famous, they say, for being marginally employed, never paying for drinks, and always looking for a place to crash. (In his memoir, he mentions bouts of homelessness.) Even before his turn towards MAGA, he’d fallen out with many of these friends because they tired of him taking advantage of their goodwill. Messigian asked him to move out after she says he neglected her dog.
Morgan and Messigian both reported Strand to the FBI after seeing photos of him at the Capitol on January 6. They were furious when Trump pardoned him. January 6 was one of the most “horrifying moments in our history that I experienced,” says Messigian. “So any pass that he’s been given is unfortunate and undeserved.”
Morgan, who is gay, feels doubly angry about Strand’s latest reinvention as a congressional candidate. “I still can’t believe he is even running for an office. In one video I saw, he was going off on trans rights and gay rights,” he told me. “I was like, dude, so many of the LGBTQ people had your back and took care of you the whole time you lived here, and now you’re going after them.”
It’s not clear whether Strand’s J6 narrative or his attacks on the LGBTQ community are winning him many votes. He has secured a few endorsements from MAGA world, including from Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Gen. Michael Flynn, and MyPillow guy Mike Lindell and talk show host Dennis Prager. But his campaign has failed to raise much money—little more than $100,000, with almost $20,000 of that coming from a personal loan from Strand himself. (Not even Simone Gold seems to have contributed, according to FEC records.)
Strand has made much of the fact that Turning Point USA, the conservative youth group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, had endorsed him. But the week before the primary, the group quietly unendorsed him and threw its weight behind one of his challengers, Catalina Lauf, who worked at the Commerce Department in the first Trump administration.
Strand had been fervently trying to win an endorsement from Trump. But the president doesn’t like to endorse losers, and a Victory Insights poll poll released August 7 showed Strand languishing at the bottom of the pack, with barely 3 percent support. On Friday, Trump endorsed Lauf.