It's a rare thing, indeed, for one of my interests to overlap with American politics in 2023. If I'm honest, it hasn't happened since the last time someone was on the news claiming that video games were corrupting the youth, and that hasn't even happened in long enough for a lot of people to have forgotten it was ever a thing in the first place.

But that's exactly what happened in May, when politics reared its ugly head into the cartoon world of professional wrestling. No, I'm not talking about the exploits former President of the United States and WWE Hall of Famer, Donald Trump. In fact, this story involves Colorado's Representative Lauren Boebert, and the former wrestling legend that her mother has previously claimed was her father.

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You see, back in the mid-eighties, Rep. Boebert's mother had a relationship with wrestler 'Sweet' Stan Lane, who had gained fame in the early part of the decade as one-half of the legendary tag team, The Fabulous Ones, then again in the late-eighties as one-third of The Midnight Express, yet another legendary team.

After Rep. Boebert was born in Florida in 1986, her mother, Shawn Roberts Bentz, claimed that Mr. Lane was her new baby's father. According to first-hand accounts from Stan's former wrestling manager, Jim Cornette, Stan doubted the validity of this claim. In 1990, he submitted to a paternity test as part of a suit brought by Ms. Bentz, the results of which seemed to determine that 'Sweet Stan' was not, in fact, Rep. Boebert's father.

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You'd think these test results would have closed the book on this particular story, but that's not how things ended up playing out. While the story did fade from the forefront of the professional wrestling news world, and despite her suit being dismissed, Ms. Bentz would continue to allege that Mr. Lane was the father of her daughter, with no actual evidence, for the next thirty-ish years. During Ms. Boebert's first term in the U.S. House of Representatives, and likely because of the same, the story found new life and rose again, like a zombie that just won't die.

During a February 2021 episode of Mr. Cornette's podcast, Jim Cornette's Drive-Thru (NSFW language)he fielded a question from a listener about the validity of a 2013 Facebook post that was attributed to Ms. Bentz. In this post, she again accused Stan Lane of fathering and abandoning Rep. Boebert, then 26 and nowhere near a career in politics.

Mr. Cornette wrote the accusation off as foolish, but the story began to pick up traction on its own in some of the less-reputable parts of the internet, as salacious stories like these tend to do. Unfortunately, the coverage led to a lot of unnecessary and unwanted attention for a 69-year-old man who was just trying to enjoy his retirement from the public eye, not to mention any toll this ordeal may have taken on Rep. Boebert, herself.

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Fast-forward to May of 2023, and both Rep. Boebert and Mr. Lane agreed to take another DNA test to put this issue to rest, once and for all. When it was all said and done, the results again concluded that 'Sweet Stan' is not the father of Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert. This time, Ms. Boebert publicly accepted the results of the test, so hopefully, this matter will be settled forever.

What's the moral of today's story? Well, you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet, particularly things that are easily fact-checked and have already been proven to be untrue.

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