A Delilah’s Gentlemen’s Club worker admits to storming the Capitol with a pair of aspiring Proud Boys
"If I died it would be something I was so passionate for, so whatever. Lol,” Rachel Myers, 33, of Port Richmond texted a friend in the run-up to the attack.
An employee of Delilah’s Gentlemen’s Club in Philadelphia who stormed the Capitol with a pair of aspiring New Jersey Proud Boys pleaded guilty Tuesday to her role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Rachel Myers, 33, of Port Richmond, told a federal judge in Washington she breached the building along with the mob of angry supporters of former President Donald Trump because she believed the 2020 election had been stolen and wanted to stop congressional certification of the vote.
But even after passing rioters brawling with officers, joining the shouting crowds in the Capitol Rotunda, and stepping through the smashed-in doors to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s suite of offices, Myers insisted on social media in the days that followed that the attack she had participated in had been an “inside job.”
“It was … antifa members who spread out and planned this attack,” she told friends on Facebook, according to court filings in her case. “Makes sense when I look back at it all.”
None of that bravado was on display Tuesday as Myers entered her guilty plea to one misdemeanor count of illegally demonstrating on Capitol grounds.
She said little as U.S. District Judge Jia M. Cobb walked her through a series of routine questions to ensure she understood the implications of her guilty plea. Her attorney, Thomas Burke, did not immediately return requests for comment after the hearing.
Myers’ decision makes her the 45th Pennsylvanian convicted of playing a role in the riot, which caused millions in damage, injured scores of officers, and threatened the peaceful transition of power.
But text messages in her case reveal she and the two men with whom she traveled to Washington — Lawrence Earl Stackhouse, a sheet-metal worker and aspiring Proud Boy from Gloucester Township, and Michael Gianos, a Proud Boys prospect from Marlton — to be among the most outspoken.
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.
Text messages exchanged among the three in the days after the insurrection showed them 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.
“It was a set up and I watched it all happen,” Myers wrote in a Facebook post two days after the attack. “I watched it all happen. This was an absolute inside job.”
In others, she insisted that no riot had occurred, that “the media are absolute liars,” and that Vice President Mike Pence was “a deep state traitor” who had conspired with police officers to open the Capitol doors and lure Trump’s supporters into the building so they could be criminally charged.
As photos began to circulate online of Myers and the two men on Jan. 6 — Stackhouse wearing a Proud Boys hoodie, Myers carrying a backpack bearing the Delilah’s logo — they worried the FBI might identify the Spring Garden Street club and track her down.
“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 her door.
Myers faces up to six months behind bars at a sentencing scheduled for February.
Stackhouse was sentenced to two weeks’ incarceration in June.
Gianos has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.