‘I thought I had my future wife’: The Florida woman catfishing America’s political class

RARITAN, New Jersey — Rob Field wondered if he had finally met the one.

In December 2024, Field — then a top aide to Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey — swiped right on the dating app profile of a woman named Leah. When the self-described Florida transplant arrived for a winter date without a coat, Field purchased one for her. The two, who shared an affinity for left-leaning politics, grew closer over homebaked peanut-butter cookies and even talked of weekend trips to out-of-state football games. Over months of texting, Field came to believe that the woman who identified herself as Leah Andrews might be his “forever person.”

But just over five months after they first met, surreptitiously recorded videos of their dates and calls were posted online by conservative influencer Steven Crowder. Field watched himself on tape — his private observations on fellow Democrats and Republicans suddenly available for public consumption, just days before New Jersey’s contested 2025 primary election for governor.

When he heard her voice in those videos it became clear to Field that she had never been who she said she was. She was not Leah Andrews, according to a lawsuit filed this week by Field, but a Florida woman named Alysia Gamble. According to public records and online videos we have reviewed, Gamble — who is married with kids — was a former QAnon organizer.

Gamble’s five-month pursuit of Field wasn’t an isolated project: We have identified at least three other instances in which the Florida woman went undercover to court men in an attempt to capture a few moments of viral content later published online by Crowder or conservative activist James O’Keefe. Crowder’s media company, Louder with Crowder, did not respond to a request for comment, and O’Keefe, who is not named in the lawsuit, declined to comment for this article.

Undercover videos have become a potent weapon against perceived opponents of the right — union leaders, public radio executives, federal bureaucrats, local election officials — who face lifelong embarrassment and upended careers from video clips that critics say can be misleading or taken out of context.

But Gamble’s operation against the 36-year-old Field seems to have gone further than a candid-camera gotcha to a long-term catfishing operation that involves a deep, sustained cultivation of political targets.

“I invested a lot of my time, my emotions, my financial resources, into a five-month relationship — and got my heart stomped on,” Field told me at an Italian restaurant in central New Jersey, the same place he and Gamble went on their final date.

He provided me with the relationship’s voluminous digital trail, including text message correspondence and gift receipts, as well as medical records from his therapist that show him struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder since. I scoured social media posts and reviewed hours of footage posted by conservative commentators, interviewing multiple people who featured in similar videos and identified Gamble as the woman who courted them.

Gamble did not respond to multiple attempts to reach her for this article, including via a letter hand-delivered to her home address and calls to a phone number listed for her and her husband in public records. Her husband, Brian, also did not respond to emails sent to his personal and work accounts, as well as a direct message on social media.

As Alysia Gamble’s former paramours tend to their emotional and psychological wounds, they all have been left to wonder: Who put their would-be romantic partner up to this?

‘Could she be the one?’

Upon arriving for their first date in December 2024, the hostess at a northern New Jersey steakhouse told Field that his “wife is in the bathroom.” The two had matched just days earlier on the dating app Bumble, with Field enticed as much by the short brunette’s looks as the fact that her profile declared her in search of a long-term relationship. They exchanged messages for 90 minutes after they first matched, according to the lawsuit.

“I thought to myself, could she be the one?” he said. “And so I was really hoping that she would — that she was.”

At the time, Field was at the peak of a 15-year career in New Jersey politics that had wound through the state’s second-largest city hall, congressional campaigns and now, the governor’s office. As Murphy’s deputy chief of staff for intergovernmental affairs, Field served as liaison between the governor’s office and New Jersey’s congressional delegation, county officials and every mayor in the state. He was familiar to the state’s political class and unknown beyond it, a quiet force who typically kept to himself and even avoided social media.

As he put in 12-hour workdays, Field worried aspects of life had passed him by as he focused on his career. Murphy’s term would end the upcoming year, the governor’s successor uncertain, and Field was intent on focusing on goals beyond climbing the career ladder — he said he wanted to find his “life partner.”

She introduced herself as Leah Andrews, a traveling nurse who grew up in southwest Florida while also spending time on a Kentucky family farm; now, she was temporarily staying with her cousin in northern New Jersey. That close connection to family resonated with Field, whose father died when he was just a few years old, leaving him to be raised by a single mom.

Within two weeks of matching online, they went on three dates. They kissed on the second. The dates lasted hours, as Andrews peppered him with questions: What was his work in the governor's office like? What did he think of the bills Murphy had signed, like that ban on plastic bags? Her inquisitive nature was no surprise given that her response to the dating profile prompt “the one thing I’d love to know about you” was “Everything ever.”

They discovered that their political views lined up perfectly. She claimed she had gone out of her way to care for patients who were unauthorized immigrants in Florida since her colleagues would not treat them well. Frustrated with Florida’s conservative policies, she appreciated the left-leaning bent of her temporary new home.

“I love that … you are progressive, you have a great heart, are super empathetic and you care deeply about others!” he wrote in a birthday card he gave her in May 2025 along with a $223 vintage messenger bag from My Chemical Romance, the rock band she said was among her favorites. “That indeed makes you the rarest of them all and I’m so happy to have you in my life.”

In hindsight, Field acknowledged, there were red flags. Andrews would exclusively take ride share services to and from dates. She was insistent he not take photos of her using his phone. And she would be out of New Jersey for long stretches of time.

But in the moment, Field said he found reasons to push his doubts aside. Andrews claimed to previously have a stalker, so she was wary of photos. She said her sister was going through a nasty divorce, and she was helping with the children. How could anyone object to taking care of family?

“[Y]ou mean the world to me and meeting you has made me so happy,” Field told Andrews via text message in February 2025, one of many that I reviewed. “I’m serious about you and building a relationship together. Take all the time you need to help [your sister]. Family first and I’ll be here waiting for you when you get back.”

The two would meet in person on just six occasions, according to the lawsuit, but Andrews expressed just enough interest in Field to have him keep coming back. They kissed on dates, and even as she claimed a turbulent personal life, they would text regularly and schedule calls — and she appeared to go out of her way to see him when she was back in New Jersey. When he texted to ask if she would be his Valentine, Andrews replied “Yea duh lol.”

“I'm just thinking: There’s a woman out there who's interested in pursuing a long-term relationship with me, and she's doing that because she's flying back and forth from Florida during a difficult situation for her,” Field recounted in an interview. “I thought it was real.”

On June 4, 2025, Field was at home preparing a dinner of macaroni and cheese. Primaries to replace Murphy were a week away, and like most of the state’s political class, Field was keeping an eye on both parties’ choices. Democrats faced a six-way choice that reflected a range of possible directions for their party in the Trump era. On the Republican side, a presidential endorsement appeared to have given former gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli a lock on the nomination, but he nonetheless had to fend off a spirited fight on his right flank from conservative radio host Bill Spadea.

As he made dinner, Field heard from Bernards Township Mayor Janice Fields, a member of the Republican National Committee. The two knew each other from Field’s job in the governor’s office, where he worked with every local official in the state — Democrats, Republicans and independents alike.

But the mayor did not want to discuss the gubernatorial election or municipal issues. Rather, she wanted to inform him of a video just posted on the platform X. It featured Field in shaky footage, speaking candidly about New Jersey politics — explaining how Democrats overperform in early voting and referring to the plastic-bag ban as “inconvenient.”

Field instantly recognized the voice on the other side of the restaurant table where he had been filmed. It was the woman he had been seeing for months.

“I just thought to myself, ‘What the hell did I get myself into?’” he said. “And at that time, I realized that ‘Leah’ was an undercover MAGA operative.”

Going undercover

Three separate videos of Field, taken from across the five-month relationship, appeared on X over a two-day period in June.

All, according to the lawsuit, were posted online by Crowder, a conservative influencer best known for jumping headfirst into culture war issues rather than electoral politics. After a recent deadly shooting at a San Diego mosque, which is being investigated as a hate crime, Crowder described Islam as an “evil ideology” and a “cult.”

Crowder, who has nearly six million subscribers on YouTube and 2.5 million on X, is most famous for a style of video where he parks himself on a college campus and invites liberal students to debate. But over the last decade, he began to experiment with another genre — targeting perceived opponents of the right by having someone meet undercover to secure footage that could be released for public viewing.

In 2019, Crowder dispatched a woman into the waiting room of an abortion clinic, who secretly recorded her conversations there. Just months later, Crowder posted another video where he posed as a transgender woman to get inside a Planned Parenthood clinic. In August 2023, Crowder announced he was forming an “undercover investigative unit” to expand his reach, suggesting it would create a “culture of accountability.”

It was a genre pioneered by O’Keefe, a New Jersey native and the founder of Project Veritas. O’Keefe’s undercover practices have had real-world impact, including to catalyze the demise of the now-defunct liberal organizing group Acornin the early 2010s. In 2017, one of O’Keefe’s undercover operatives was caught in the act as she attempted to pitch the Washington Post on a fake sex scandal regarding a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate.

Conservative media figures describe such undercover operations as a form of journalism. Yet the tactics often defy mainstream journalistic practices and ethical standards, which typically forbid reporters from misidentifying themselves to secure access. At Project Veritas, former American and British spies have reportedly helped train people to work as undercover operatives.

O’Keefe’s operations have had close brushes with the law: In 2021, the FBI raided his home as part of an investigation into how Project Veritas obtained a copy of then-President Joe Biden’s daughter’s diary — although O’Keefe has emphasized that Project Veritas never published the diary. (No one from the group was ever criminally charged, although other people pleaded guilty to charges related to the diary theft.) He left the organization in 2023 amid accusations from the group’s board that he spent donor dollars on “personal luxuries.” (Project Veritas did not respond to a request for comment on its involvement with Gamble.)

Shortly afterwards, O’Keefe founded the O’Keefe Media Group to produce videos under a different corporate structure. Among the first executives at the newly formed company was a man named Brian Gamble.

Meet the Gambles

Brian Gamble had long kept his professional and political lives separate. For over a decade he worked at the American division of a French water company, Veolia Water, eventually working his way up to chief information officer, according to his LinkedIn profile. (Veolia Water did not respond to a request for comment.)

But his two worlds collided after he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Wearing a ski mask and helmet that said “Kill the Deep State,” Gamble was near the front of a crowd that breached an initial barricade on the Capitol grounds. In his telling, the FBI contacted his employer in connection to Jan. 6, which led to him losing his job. He was not criminally charged.

But Gamble was not unemployed for long. Almost immediately after being fired, he took a post as CIO for the America Project, a nonprofit led by former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, according to his LinkedIn profile. Brian Gamble did not respond to repeated attempts I made to reach him, both digitally and at his Florida home, for comment. Field’s lawsuit does not name him.

Flynn is best known for pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with a Russian official — although he was later pardoned by Trump. (Flynn recently settled a wrongful prosecution lawsuit with the Trump administration.) But Gamble and Flynn’s relationship appears to go beyond just business.

“I’m friends with the guy — I can pick up the phone and say ‘hey how's it going,’” Brian Gamble said of Flynn in a 2021 interview with the digital-video channel Firearms of America. The two regularly interact with each other on X. Flynn could not be reached for comment, despite outreach to a nonprofit that he chairs and his attorneys.

The America Project wasn’t the first time Gamble and Flynn crossed paths. In 2019, Gamble founded a company dubbed the Red Pill Roadshow which hosted rallies appealing to QAnon followers. The QAnon movement flourished online during President Donald Trump’s first term — and while QAnon has become a big tent of several wide-ranging conspiracy theories, a core belief of the baseless plot is that Trump is trying to fight a secret cabal of satan-worshipping global elites in politics, Hollywood and the media.

Flynn was a speaker at one of the Red Pill Roadshow’s events, according to a Rumble post. The company attracted some media attention, although it struggled financially. According to tax records Gamble posted to social media, the company received under $500 in income and had a net loss of $3,439 in 2020. Gamble said he created Q-themed Magic 8 balls to help cover event-hosting costs.

“We don't make a dime on our show. … We're usually out money,” he said in the 2021 interview, referring to the Red Pill Roadshow. “But I always say: ‘It's the best money I've ever lost.’”

The company was dissolved the following year. In online interviews around that time, Brian Gamble distanced himself from the QAnon movement, although he said his wife was an adherent.

As a nurse in southwest Florida, Alysia Gamble was known as a “conservative hippie” by her hospital colleagues, she told an interviewer in 2019. She had dabbled in conspiracy theories — namely the “Clinton body count,” which falsely states the former first family have secretly murdered dozens of political rivals — but was especially intrigued when a physician assistant she worked with introduced her to a QAnon online forum, she said in that same interview.

Alysia Gamble wanted to bring the hyper-online conspiracy theory to the real world. So in 2019, she abandoned vacation plans to organize a QAnon rally in Washington, according to her husband.

“She said: ‘Let's forgo Europe and let's go to D.C. — I want a megaphone and I want a sign and I want to support my president,’” Brian Gamble told a QAnon-aligned online interviewer in 2020.

On Sept. 11, 2019, Alysia Gamble found herself at the Washington monument grounds in the nation’s capital — standing on a small stage with a large “Q” banner behind her — calling up other activists to speak. (There were over 35 hashtags written on the banner, including “#QAnon,” “#NoCoincidences” and “#PizzaGate” — the last a conspiracy theory revolving around false claims that Democrats ran a child sex trafficking operation from the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor.) The Red Pill Roadshow would later call the event a “historic first public rally for the Q movement.”

Little is known about Alysia Gamble’s transformation from QAnon preacher to undercover conservative operative. Her social media account was suspended from X. In an online interview, she said she was also banned from Eventbrite and that the now-defunct streaming app Periscope blocked her audiofeeds. A spokesperson for Eventbrite said they could not share details on individual accounts.

We reviewed hours of footage in undercover videos posted by Crowder and O’Keefe between 2019 and 2026 to confirm at least three other men who were recorded by Gamble. In separate interviews, each man recounted a similar story to Field’s: meeting a woman named Leah who introduced herself as a Florida nurse. Others contacted by us did not want to talk about their experience being deceived.

The videos ultimately posted online include her voice but not her image. When presented with a photograph of Gamble that Field shared with me, the three men all identified her as the one who had duped them.

We agreed not to reveal their names or any identifiable characteristics, out of deference to their fear of embarrassment and further potential damage to their professional lives. All believed they were targeted, as Field alleges in his lawsuit, to advance a political agenda. One described having a panic attack for the first time in his life after the videos were released.

“I think the human toll of this is pretty extreme,” said one of the three men, who believes he was targeted because of his role in government. “People go on to dating apps because they're looking for human connections. And none of us ever thought that the people we’re meeting are actually there for the purpose of hurting us in some way.”

On June 9, 2025, days after the final video came out, Field sent his last text message to Gamble — a 250-word missive in which he said her deception broke him. He said she took his “identity” and “soul” and implored her to not do it again to someone else.

“Because of what you did to me, I can no longer trust anyone. Ever,” read the message, which we have seen. “Because of what you did to me, I can no longer date anyone. I'm so hurt because I thought I had my future wife and I treated you like a queen. I owe you a debt of gratitude for teaching me a valuable life lesson to not be as open, trusting, loving or caring.”

He added: “I loved you so deeply. I can never love again. Please don’t hurt anybody else like you hurt me.”

Gamble did not respond to his message. Days later, he believes he saw her appear on Bumble with new profiles under slightly different names.

The fallout

Field suspects the clips of him were released to influence the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary. One highlighted Field’s comments that Ciattarelli was not as MAGA as he claimed to be, which the lawsuit characterizes as an effort to boost Spadea, who was endorsed by Flynn, among conservative primary voters. Spadea finished nearly 50 points behind Ciattarelli.

In a text to POLITICO, Spadea said he had no advance knowledge of the videos and didn’t know Crowder. “I can’t speak to anyone’s motives,” Spadea said.

The videos featuring Field were a dud by comparison to other conservative gotcha videos, which have led to a chief executive’s resignation and a state investigation. The Field clips were filled with commentary that would be banal if spoken by any Trenton pundit, and did not earn a single article of coverage in the mainstream press.

Field nevertheless worried his time in the governor’s office was done. But instead of facing punishment from his colleagues or the state’s chief executive, they ran to his defense. Tim Hillmann, who was Murphy’s chief of staff at the time, said that “nothing we heard in the videos was of any concern to any of us.”

Murphy, weighing in on the matter publicly for the first time, cast blame on the people who set Field up.

“Rob Field is a dedicated public servant who has worked tirelessly on behalf of the people of New Jersey,” the former governor said in a statement. “Because he was a government official, he was targeted by someone who pretended to be a romantic interest simply to hurt him. This deceitful behavior was awful and cruel, and I hope there will be accountability for what he and others went through.”

Field’s colleagues in the governor’s office examined the state’s one-party consent rules, which allows someone to secretly record a conversation — as long as he or she is part of it. New Jersey is not one of the 11 states which requires all people in a conversation to consent to its recording in advance.

“We kicked it around. It brought it to the forefront and made it a bit more personal,” said Hillmann, who now works for one of the state’s largest hospital networks. “It was more complicated to unwind than we thought it would be.”

Indeed, legislation to change the law was introduced in late 2025. But it stalled in the statehouse amidst opposition from mainstream press groups — with concern that it could stifle whistleblowers from coming forward to prove evidence of wrongdoing. Secret recordings in the state leaked to the press have revealed tensions in the highest levels of government during the Covid-19 pandemic and allegedly unethical practices from major health care providers.

Those who specialize in undercover videos like the one which targeted Field characterize themselves, too, as journalists and justify surreptitious tactics as necessary to produce newsworthy material.

“There’s a reason that you're allowed to record conversations across the country — it is legally recognized because investigative journalism matters,” Crowder said in one 2024 video.

State investigators examined Field’s case to see whether a crime might have been committed, according to Field. Ultimately, according to Field, nothing came of that investigation — except he was provided a name that detectives said he may want to look into: Alysia Gamble.

A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said, “the office does not confirm or deny the existence or status of criminal investigations.”

Field is now suing the woman he hoped would be his forever person, along with Crowder and his media company Louder With Crowder. The federal lawsuit filed on Tuesday alleges they committed fraud, violated Field’s privacy, and intentionally caused his emotional distress when Crowder “knowingly procured” Gamble to record Field “using a hidden camera” and capture his “oral, visual, and electronic messages, communications, and images.”

Field said that Bumble “let me down” and was an “absolute failure” for safety but did not name the company as a party in the lawsuit. A spokesperson for Bumble said the company could not comment on individual accounts, but said that “violations of our Community Guidelines may result in enforcement action, including account bans, and we may provide relevant safety resources to affected members.”

The lawsuit seeks a minimum of $75,000 in damages; according to the complaint, Field spent $2,858.92 on dates and gifts across the span of the relationship. Field is also claiming that the videos damaged his political career, and notes he did not remain in state government after Murphy’s term ended. According to the lawsuit, Field now earns $60,000 less in his current job (as deputy town administrator in Bridgewater, his hometown) than he did in the governor’s office.

It has been almost exactly a year since the first videos were released from Crowder, and Field believes he now knows a lot more about Alysia Gamble than he did then. But he can not stop referring to her by the name he used when he thought she might be his “forever person.”

“It's gonna be hard for me to put myself out there to really bring myself to trust anybody — to love anybody ever again,” he told me. “There's lasting psychological damage that was caused by Leah and I don’t know if I can ever trust anybody ever again.”