Delilah’s Gentlemen’s Club bartender gets probation for storming the Capitol with aspiring Proud Boys

A bartender at a Philadelphia gentlemen’s club who stormed the Capitol with a pair of aspiring Proud Boys was spared prison time Thursday as she faced sentencing for her role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Rachel Myers, 33, who has poured drinks at Delilah’s Gentleman’s Club & Steakhouse in Old City for the past eight years, was ordered to serve two years’ probation and pay $500 in restitution for breaching the building along with a mob of angry supporters of President Donald Trump who believed the 2020 election had been stolen.

But even though Myers had told others on Facebook she was “totally ready for civil war” in the run-up to the attack, her attorney, Thomas Burke, insisted in court that she had no desire for violence when she traveled to Washington, D.C., to hear Trump speak.

“Ms. Myers went to Washington, D.C., on January 6th to participate in a public rally,” he said. “There is no evidence to suggest that [she] was planning to use violence on any persons or as a means to stop the electoral process.”

Myers’ sentencing comes three months after she pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of illegally demonstrating on Capitol grounds, making her one of the dozens of Pennsylvania residents who have been charged with participating in the riot.

In all, the Justice Department has charged nearly 80 people from the state with joining the attack that caused millions of dollars in damage, injured scores of officers, and threatened the peaceful transition of power.

Most, like Myers, have pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges for merely entering the building, though dozens of others are facing more serious charges including attacking police.

Michael Dickinson, a 31-year-old screen printer from South Philadelphia, was also sentenced Thursday to 20 months in prison for brawling with security on the Capitol’s north side. He pleaded guilty in September, admitting he threw an empty coffee tumbler and a bucket filled with an unknown liquid at officers seeking to subdue violent protesters.

But while Myers and the two men with whom she entered the Capitol that day — Lawrence Earl Stackhouse, a sheet-metal worker from Gloucester Township who’d inquired weeks before about joining the Philadelphia chapter of the Proud Boys, and Michael Gianos, a Proud Boys prospect from Marlton — did not face charges that severe, their text messages show them to be among some of the most eager to breach the building.

In the week before the riot, Stackhouse sent Myers a text saying he and Gianos planned to attend the rally Trump was hosting near the White House.

“Love it! Love me some PBs,” she responded. When she said she, too, was planning to be in Washington and was eager to fight with counterprotesters, Stackhouse offered to bring her a knife.

“And if I died it would be something I was so passionate for, so whatever. Lol,” she texted Gianos.

They were among the first to enter the Capitol on Jan. 6 as a member of the mob smashed windows near the Senate Wing doors. And after passing rioters brawling with officers and shouting crowds in the Capitol Rotunda, she witnessed a rioter kick down the door to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s conference room and followed the man inside.

Texts exchanged among the three in the days after Jan. 6 showed Myers, Stackhouse, and Gianos ping-ponging between reveling in their participation, convincing themselves that left-wing groups had been behind the attack, and fretting over whether the FBI would soon show up at their doors.

“I was set up and I watched it all happen,” Myers wrote in a Facebook post two days after the attack. ”This was an absolute inside job.”

Later, she told friends on the social media site that “it was … antifa members who spread out and planned this attack. Makes sense when I look back at it all.”

And yet in other messages, she insisted that no riot had occurred and that “the media are absolute liars.”

As the FBI and online amateur sleuths set out to identify many of the rioters from photos and video of that day posted to social media — including one that showed Myers carrying a backpack bearing the Delilah’s logo and Stackhouse wearing a Proud Boys hoodie — she and her companions that day began to worry.

“Hey. You good?” Stackhouse texted Myers, according to court filings. He added later: “There’s a Delilah’s in AC [Atlantic City] too soooo that helps.”

Still, it was the backpack — along with reports from a coworker and another tipster — that eventually led the FBI to Myers’ home in Port Richmond last year.

A distinctively Philadelphia article of clothing was also what did in Dickinson, the other Philadelphian sentenced this week for participating in the riot.

He joined the crowds on Jan. 6 that had amassed near the Capitol’s north side wearing a light-gray hoodie with a green shamrock — the words Grays Ferry, Devil’s Pocket, and Schuylkill written on each leaf.

When the crowds surged forward and police sought to bring them back into control, Dickinson was caught on social media video throwing the empty coffee tumbler at the officers and hitting one in the face. He later maintained he had done so because he believed the officer was being too aggressive with two women who were part of the mob.

But moments later, Dickinson showed up on video again — this time hurling a bucket filled with an unknown liquid at the police lines. In response, officers shot him with rubber bullets, hitting him in the mouth, breaking his jaw and knocking out several of his teeth, his attorney Nathan I. Silver II said.

Images of Dickinson clutching a cloth to his injured mouth, blood dripping down his Philly sweatshirt, drew the attention of the community of amateur online sleuths that has devoted itself to identifying participants in the riot. They dubbed him #LipADelphia, recognizing the neighborhoods on his shirt until the FBI announced it had IDed and arrested him in the fall of 2021.

In addition to his prison term, Dickinson was ordered to serve three years’ probation upon his release and pay $2,000 in fines.