Memeorandum points me to an odd story at Slate by a Christina Cauterucci: “I Think I Found Kyrsten Sinema’s Side Hustle.”
It is 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, and I am exchanging Facebook messages with Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema about a lightly used pair of Badgley Mischka heels.
At least, I think it’s Kyrsten Sinema. It’s her name on the Facebook Marketplace listing, and it’s her in the profile photo, grinning at the finish line of a running race. The seller bio says she lives in Phoenix, and our one mutual Facebook friend is a former Democratic National Committee staffer. The shoes—4.5-inch stilettos adorned with rhinestone-studded flower appliqués—look as if they would fit pretty well in Sinema’s wardrobe.
But would a sitting senator respond within seconds on a weekday morning to a message about her used heels? Would it be worth her time to photograph a pair of old shoes, write a sales listing, field inquiries from potential buyers, and arrange pickup logistics—all for just $65?
“They’re beautiful shoes,” the user DMs me as I Venmo the money. “Enjoy them!”
This is far from the only listing of secondhand clothes this user, “Kyrsten Sinema,” has posted.
The user is currently hawking—among other things—a $215 cycling ensemble, a $25 trucker hat, and a $150 stainless steel watch with a silicone strap. Within the past six weeks, she has offloaded a $150 fitness tracker ring, an $80 cycling jersey, and a $500 bicycle travel case. Over the past two years, and across at least five Facebook groups for athletes, she has listed several dozen personal items, including a $100 pair of sunglasses (“Just too big for my tiny head!!”), two $50 puffer jackets, three $75 pairs of high-heeled boots, a $75 cycling bib, a $60 Lululemon raincoat, several mesh tanks at $55 a pop ($20 off the current retail price), and multiple bikinis, priced between $60 and $70, that ranged from “never worn” to “in great condition.”
Arizona Capitol Times editor Jim Small, who has been Facebook friends with the Senator going back to the days when he was a reporter and she was in the Arizona House of Representatives, confirms that “Yes, that really is Kyrsten Sinema selling designer clothes and bike gear on Facebook.”
Now, as Cauterucci notes, there’s likely nothing all that problematic here. Sinema almost certainly isn’t breaking any rules.
Nurturing a side hustle in clothing resale is uncommon among federal elected officials (as far as we know), but it is not prohibited by the relevant portions of the Senate ethics guidelines. There is nothing in the rulebook that would bar a senator from hawking vintage T-shirts on Depop or opening an Etsy store to unload old neckties. Senators must report any outside income they earn, and they cannot make more than a certain amount each year. But selling used items at a loss isn’t income. And in the current congressional year, the limit is $29,895, a threshold that Facebook Sinema’s gross sales figures—at least those that are visible on Facebook—don’t come close to meeting. That would likely be true even if we added the $22,964.93 that Sen. Sinema included on a 2021 financial disclosure form for the salary that she makes as an instructor at Arizona State University.
That’s not to say that Facebook Sinema isn’t making good money from her resale business. Some big-ticket items have sold on Facebook Marketplace, including a $600 treadmill marked down from $1,000 and a $3,500 road-bike frame.
But Facebook Sinema also trades in inexpensive stuff, the kind of random items that might sit in another triathlete’s basement for years because it’s not worth the time it would take to get rid of them. She is selling a water bottle—“used once (at the 2022 Boston Marathon!)”—for $20, about half the retail price. Facebook Sinema also once listed a used neon-yellow “Do Epic Shit” hat for $30, plus $7 for shipping. A brand new “Do Epic Shit” hat from Betty Designs currently costs $29.99.
While there might be some questions about a Senator leveraging a business selling tchotchkes as a means of laundering what are effectively bribes, that’s clearly not what’s going on here. She’s selling used items for, in most cases, less—usually considerably less—than the cost new. This is ethically no different from her holding a garage sale.
There are amusing parallels with the much-ridiculed Trump NFT grift that we also learned about yesterday. But, in addition to Sinema decidedly not going out of her way to draw attention to it, she’s actually giving people something of value for their money.
Still . . . it’s . . . odd.
Only an extraordinarily frugal consumer would spend any fraction of her day selling and shipping a $20 water bottle if she earned about $200,000 a year, as Sen. Sinema does. Her wares for sale also indicate an orientation toward pragmatism over sentimentality: Facebook Sinema would rather have $50 than the shirt she was wearing when she qualified for the Boston Marathon. The fact that some items have been listed for months without a price reduction suggests that Facebook Sinema is dogged, willing to wait for what she believes she deserves. And also that she does not lack storage space.
Beyond that, she apparently buys a lot of fairly expensive items to wear only once or twice. That’s not terribly unusual for celebrity women, I guess, but it seems weird to me. I sort of get why she’d only want to wear a particular dress or even pair of distinctive heels just once and then sell them off; she’s photographed constantly and people would notice the duplication. And it’s not like a male Senator, who can get by wearing the same three dark suits in constant rotation. But why use a water bottle once and then sell it? Ditto workout gear?
Beyond that, even aside from the influence-peddling angle, she could certainly command more money for these items by capitalizing on her celebrity. That’s she’s doing it via her personal Facebook page is . . . quirky?
