Haven Orecchio-Egresitz is currently a journalist for the national outlet Insider but spent her career as a local reporter in Massachusetts.
There, at the Berkshire Eagle, Cape Cod Times, and Boston Globe, she cut her teeth filing open records requests and putting in the requisite work to persuade unlikely interview subjects to open up for stories that would provide necessary context for her readers.
That’s important background to understand how she landed a major scoop about a pair of 911 calls placed by a teenage son of Colorado Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert. The politician’s son had called authorities five months ago to report his father, Lauren’s husband Jayson, had gotten physical with him.
That story has since blown up, aggregated far and wide with outlets attempting to match the reporting or advance it. The exclusive coverage came soon after news about Lauren Boebert filing for a divorce and citing irreconcilable differences with her husband.
The story of the 911 calls, reported by Insider did not come Orecchio-Egresitz’s way from some opposition research dump or from a lawyer looking for leverage in the divorce proceedings, she said over the phone this week. It was good old-fashioned reporting. The reporter, who had produced an earlier Boebert scoop based on public recordings of phone calls regarding the family, read about the congresswoman’s pending divorce and filed an open records request with local authorities asking for calls placed to the home covering a specific timeframe.
What she got back from the records request was newsworthy. Here was the compelling lede of her Insider story:
Rep. Lauren Boebert’s son called 911 in December to report that his father, Jayson Boebert, had gotten physical with him and was “throwing” him around the house and that he didn’t know why. Minutes after the call ended — while Garfield County Sheriff’s Office deputies were on their way to their home — the teen called again to take the accusations back, with Lauren Boebert jumping on the phone to say her son “doesn’t need help.” Jayson Boebert denied to the deputies — and to Insider — that he had gotten physical with the teen.
As someone who has followed news stories about one of Colorado’s more attention-grabbing members of Congress, what I found nearly as compelling as the content of the calls was how the reporter was able to get Jayson Boebert to comment at length for the piece.
“He overreacted. We’re back to being a family,” Boebert, who works in the oil industry, told Insider, adding that he was uncomfortable with his family being in the spotlight. “All I do is work and come home and try to raise everyone,” he said. He told Insider he disciplined all four sons by making them run laps and do push-ups — not by hitting them. Each one of Boebert’s sons went through a phase between 14 and 16 where they didn’t always get along with their dad, he said.
Boebert said before his wife entered politics, the family spent a lot of time together when he was off from work doing recreational activities. Now that she’s “serving the country,” he spends a lot of time alone with the boys, he said. “Every teenage boy is going to want to test the bull,” he said. “We’ve gotten over it.”
Orecchio-Egresitz said she believes it helped that she is not a politics reporter.
“This was a criminal justice story, this was not a politics story,” she said. She said she left Jayson Boebert an earnest voicemail saying she had obtained some 911 calls, and offered him time to respond, making it clear that she was genuinely curious about his side of the story and acknowledging the sensitivity of it. But she was also vague enough in case she had the wrong number, she said.
He called back relatively quickly, and they talked the story through, “just being authentic and open,” she said. She told him she understood families can be complicated and explained why the story was in the public’s interest. He didn’t try to pressure her not to publish the story, she said. They talked about how she didn’t plan to name his son but would report details of the calls. She said he wanted to know if the reporter planned to release a recording of the calls, and she said she was discussing it with editors and hadn’t yet made a decision.
Orecchio-Egresitz said Insider ultimately decided not to publish audio clips of the recorded 911 calls, choosing to balance the public’s right to know with minimizing harm of a minor child of a member of Congress who is young and potentially vulnerable to bullying. “We didn’t need to further cause harm for a boy who is literally still a kid,” she said. “We wanted to minimize damage to him.”
Later, she caught up with Boebert’s press team.
“No one was trying to say it’s fake news or ‘this didn’t exist,’” the reporter said. “Everyone was acknowledging that this was fact. We thought we had enough.”
As the story unfolded in Colorado, some news outlets that closely cover Boebert credited Insider for the scoop while others did not. (The national outlet was until 2021 called Business Insider.)
Notably, coverage of the story in the geographical area Boebert represents has been relatively thin as far as I can tell via news searches at the sites of local TV stations and newspapers in the sprawling Western Slope and southern Colorado district.
Boebert, a polarizing figure whose 2020 ouster of an obscure Republican incumbent aught some Colorado reporters off guard, nearly lost her congressional reelection in November, once again confounding the state press corps. (One Denver news anchor apologized to viewers on air for not having a good read on the race.)
The congresswoman’s divorce filings show she is seeking child and spousal support, as well as parental-decision making power and to be the primary residential custodian for their children, who range in age from 10 to 18 years old, Colorado Public Radio reported. It is not a stretch to wonder whether Insider’s reporting will affect how those proceedings eventually play out.
“The safety and well-being of my family are the most important things in the world to me,” Boebert told media in a statement about the 911 calls. “We’ve had some tough times and heartache. I’ve taken action to ensure there are better days ahead for all of us.”
As for Haven Orecchio-Egresitz, she remembers what it was like as a local journalist.
“I’d say that there were probably dozens of amazing stories I missed as a local reporter, no fault of my own or of my amazing, skilled, enterprising editors,” she said. “There were also plenty of impactful, community-changing scoops that our local newsrooms got to long before the nationals even knew how to pronounce the names of the small towns they needed to call up for comment.”
More from her about that:
Local journalism is the backbone of our industry, and it is more often than not local shoe-leather reporting that leaves us at the nationals scrambling to match or follow.
If local reporters are missing big stories about their local reps once in a while, I firmly believe the fault most likely falls at the feet of the powers that be, those entities who leave our local newsrooms so wildly under-resourced that we didn’t always have the privilege to sit at our desks filing records requests or brainstorming unique angles on major stories with no real promise of a story because we were out scrambling to fill our pages — whether that be with a story about the newest farmer’s market, or another hellish June working overtime covering back-to-back high school graduations.
I am grateful that I now work at a company that — for the time being, at least — is resourced to a point where we as reporters and editors have the time, space, and energy to dig a little deeper.
“I am also grateful to all of the local reporters in Colorado and across the country who are out there working around the clock to hold the powerful to account while being underpaid, overworked, and struggling to find the work-life balance that I am lucky enough to now — finally — enjoy,” she said.
Corey Hutchins is co-director of Colorado College’s Journalism Institute, reports on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and is a journalist for multiple news outlets. Subscribe to his Inside the News newsletter, here.