Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D., Wash.) has claimed—repeatedly—that she worked in an “iPhone case factory” to help pay tuition while attending Reed College, the elite liberal arts college in Portland, Ore. The “factory” was actually a small artisanal shop that made hand-crafted wooden cases, according to Glusenkamp Perez’s former roommate. The company, Grove, was founded in 2009, and it bore little resemblance to a factory, particularly when Gluesenkamp Perez worked there. Its early work was “done in someone’s basement,” the congresswoman’s former roommate, Isaac Eger, said on a January 29 episode of his podcast. Eger has emerged as a left-wing critic of Gluesenkamp Perez. The company’s website says the mother of one of its founders “opened up her living room as the staging area for finishing the products.” By 2011, the company grew to about 10 employees, “including friends and relatives.” Only half worked full-time, according to a profile published at the time in the Oregonian. Around the time she attended Reed—Gluesenkamp Perez graduated in 2012—the company routinely posted photos to Facebook of its employees working on the phone cases. She appears in a single Facebook post: a September 2011 photo in which she poses behind one of the company’s bamboo MacBook cases. The photo was part of a company video advertising the cases titled “Introducing Grove Bamboo Backs.” Gluesenkamp Perez smiles and winks while showing off the case. An Instagram post, meanwhile, shows Gluesenkamp Perez sitting in shorts and flip flops as she appears to be "sanding" a case. It’s a far cry from the sort of work Gluesenkamp Perez said got her through college. “I did piecework. I worked in a factory that made iPhone cases and … also I was running the bike co-op,” she told the former Obama operative David Axelrod on his podcast in 2024. Gluesenkamp Perez has said she needed the job because her parents cut her off in college, though the financial statements she filed as a political candidate list no student loan debt, and her father helped finance her home in Washington two years after she graduated. “This is part of her lore,” Eger said on his podcast. “She’s definitely cosplaying as a poor person.” READ MORE: ‘She’s Definitely Cosplaying as a Poor Person’: Democratic Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez Claims She Worked In An ‘iPhone Case Factory.’ It Was Actually a Hipster Artisanal Workshop.