Full
Disclosure

I was about to leave Hawaii for the 75th Ranger Regiment. I made a stupid decision. There is no excuse for it and I am not going to offer one.

What I will tell you is that I shook the officer's hand when he arrested me. I meant it. That stop was the wake-up call I needed before I walked into one of the most demanding assignments in the Army and destroyed a career before it started. I have looked back on that night as one of the better things that happened to me — not because getting a DUI is something to be proud of, but because of what I chose to do with it. I shipped out clearer than I would have been otherwise.

I was charged in Minneapolis in 2007 in connection with a physical altercation. I was in my twenties. I was in an environment and a headspace that put me in situations I had no business being in.

I am not going to dress it up. I got into a fight. I was charged. That is the record. What came after that charge was a slow process of figuring out who I actually wanted to be — and that process took time and cost me things I did not get back.

In June of 2017, I was arrested and charged with domestic assault in Montgomery County, Tennessee. The case was dismissed. I was not convicted. No court found me guilty of domestic assault. The charge was real. The arrest was real. The dismissal is also real — and it belongs in the same sentence.

I have no contact with my ex-wife and likely never will again. I am not speaking for her, and she is not part of this campaign. I am not going to use this page to litigate the details of that night or shift what happened onto anyone else. What I will say is this: that arrest was the hardest stop sign I have ever hit. It forced a reckoning I had been avoiding for years. The work I did after 2017 — the accountability, the rebuilding, the commitment to my marriage and to becoming a different man — is not something I can prove to you on a webpage. You are going to have to watch how I operate. That is fair.

The Safe at Home program is administered by the Minnesota Secretary of State under Minnesota Statutes Chapter 5B. It assigns participants a PO Box as their legal address, which all public and private entities — including courts — are required to accept. No one can compel a participant to disclose their real location.

Here is the part that matters: according to Minnesota state policy, a person is not required to provide proof to enroll. A stated fear is sufficient. There is no verification process, no investigation, no burden of evidence. The program's own documentation confirms this directly. Once enrolled, releasing a participant's information — including simply confirming or denying their participation — requires a court order. (Minnesota DHS Eligibility Policy Manual, Section 1.3.1.4.)

What that means in practice: a parent can enroll, disappear with children, and the other parent has no legal mechanism to locate them — regardless of what a custody order says, regardless of what actually happened, regardless of what the court knows. The program was designed to protect genuine survivors of violence. It has also become a tool that can be used to vanish with children and leave the other parent with no recourse short of expensive, slow, uncertain litigation against a system that is structurally set up to defer to the enrollee.

In court, my military career — the 75th Ranger Regiment, the training, the deployments — was used against me. Not as evidence of discipline or sacrifice. As evidence of danger. The argument, made repeatedly from the stand, was that my background made me someone to be feared. That I was violent. That my daughters were not safe with me.

Those claims were not supported by evidence because there was no evidence. They were accusations. But in family court, accusations carry weight — especially when the system is already oriented toward one outcome, when advocates are lined up on one side, and when a program exists that makes physical location legally untouchable.

The court saw the dynamic. It did not correct it. It continued. My daughters have reached out to me — but contact has been inconsistent, and what comes through carries the mark of years of one-sided narrative. That is not a reflection of who my daughters are. That is what prolonged parental alienation looks like. I know what I know. I also know what I cannot prove from the outside of a program designed to keep me outside.

I did not abandon my daughters. The system made it extraordinarily difficult to stay connected — and then used my distance as further evidence against me. That is the cycle. It happens every day in Minnesota family courts. I am not the only one.

Multiple orders for protection were filed against me across three different states. I am disclosing this because it will come up — and because the full story is in the outcome, not the filing.

Not one judge, in any of those three states, made an actual finding against me. The orders were not granted on merit. No court — after reviewing the claims, the evidence, and the circumstances — found sufficient grounds to issue a ruling against me.

I am not going to characterize the motives behind each filing. I am going to let the judicial record do that. When the same pattern plays out across multiple jurisdictions and every single judge reaches the same conclusion, that is not a coincidence. That is a record. The filings are real. The findings are not — because there were none.

I had been debating it for weeks. Going to your chain of command in the military and saying "I need help" is not a small thing. There is a cost to that conversation and every soldier knows it. I went back and forth on it longer than I should have.

On August 1, 2019, I walked in and asked for help. That same afternoon I was sent to a one-month residential treatment facility at an Army hospital. I went voluntarily. Nobody ordered me there. Nobody caught me. I made the decision myself, at the bottom of a very long slide, and I walked through the door.

I am telling you this because it is going to come up — and because I think it matters that when I finally hit that wall, my instinct was not to hide, cover, or deflect. It was to ask for help and deal with it directly. That is the same instinct I am bringing to this campaign and to the office of Governor. When something is broken, you name it, you get in front of it, and you do the work. That is the only way through.