Bryon Noem Allegedly Used Work Phone for Paid Calls With Dominatrix

Shy Sotomayor says Bryon Noem first contacted her roughly nine years ago, when she was “freshly 21, almost 22,” and that she only learned his real identity after he failed to switch an alias on a PayPal invoice. The 30-year-old Colorado Springs dominatrix and sex worker, who performs online as Raelynn Riley, sat for a full-length interview with Uncloseted Media’s podcast “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton”, the outlet that first published her account earlier this year. The disclosures have piled up since April, when the Daily Mail printed messages and photos it said came from Bryon, and they continued this month with the reporting on a May 17 text he allegedly sent Sotomayor.

Bryon, 56, runs Noem Insurance Group in South Dakota and has been married to former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem since 1992. The couple has three adult children and has long presented itself as a conservative Christian family. Sotomayor said Bryon initially told her he was “a Chicago CEO” and that their contact centered on “bimbofication,” a fetish built around exaggerated, hyper-feminine aesthetics, with frequent talk of breast implants, hair work, facial feminization and hormone therapy.

She estimates Bryon paid her between $35,000 and $45,000 over nine years, a mix of Amazon gift cards in the early years and digital payments later. She told Uncloseted Media the contact did not stop after the Daily Mail report in April: in a May 17 iMessage reviewed by the outlet, Bryon allegedly wrote that he had “been a really bad boy,” then reached out again on WhatsApp.

What Shy Sotomayor Says Happened Over Nine Years

Sotomayor told Uncloseted Media that Bryon contacted her through a phone number tied to Noem Insurance Group, the same number another woman in the scene later said she had butt-dialed and heard answered “Noem Insurance, leave a message.” She said the pair never met in person and that calls ran for hours at a time, slipping from banter into detailed conversations about feminization procedures.

In text and audio reviewed by Uncloseted Media, Bryon allegedly asked repeatedly to be called Crystal and used she/her pronouns, telling Sotomayor, “I will be your trans girl.” When she asked him outright whether he wanted to be a woman, he answered, “I think I do,” per the latest account of the exchanges. He used pseudonyms including Crystal and an email address containing “Chrystalballz666.”

Sotomayor said she identified him only after pulling a PayPal invoice in which he had not changed his alias from “Jason Jackson.” She framed the disclosures as a conscious decision rather than a slip.

• Early years: Amazon gift cards, no third-party apps, contact intermittent until a gap around COVID.
• Last October: Bryon returned, bought her number directly, and the phone calls resumed.
• January: During one call, Sotomayor says she heard Kristi Noem’s voice in the room ask her husband who he was talking to.
• March 5: President Donald Trump fired Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security.
• April: The Daily Mail published its bimbofication report with photos and “hundreds” of messages.
• May 17: A text message, “I’ve been a really bad boy,” sent to Sotomayor weeks after the story broke.
• Late May: Sotomayor responds by sending Bryon a PayPal invoice for $4,500 she says he still owes her.

The Work Phone and the Insurance Trail

The phone-number detail is what has drawn the sharpest scrutiny from outside the kink-and-politics beat. Sotomayor told Uncloseted Media that Bryon used the number associated with his insurance business to schedule calls and to make or receive payments, and that he sometimes routed money through PayPal under his real name. The insurance-phone and payments summary lays out how a single number turned up in contact with multiple women over a period of years.

That raised ethics questions about a private business’s resources, and security questions about the husband of a Cabinet secretary whose portfolio included immigration enforcement and federal investigations. Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer, told the Daily Mail that if a media outlet could uncover the activity, “you can assume with a high degree of confidence that a hostile intelligence service knows this as well,” framing the conduct as a potential blackmail vector.

Sotomayor told Uncloseted Media she was aware of the security stakes from her own vantage point. She lives roughly 30 minutes from an ICE detention center in Colorado, has a Hispanic surname, and said during the period when Kristi Noem ran the agency, she feared retaliation if her identity surfaced. “If she has any inkling of who I am, what I look like, let alone my name or number, she can find me,” Sotomayor said. “She’s the head of ICE.”

Newsweek sent a text message seeking comment to Bryon Noem and an email to a representative for Kristi Noem. Neither had responded at publication, and the representative’s only on-record statement remains the March line that the family was “blindsided” and “devastated.” Bryon told The Independent in April that the allegations were “not all true,” without specifying which claims he disputes.

“I’ve Been a Really Bad Boy”: The May 17 Text

I’ve been a really bad boy.

The line landed in Sotomayor’s inbox on May 17, more than a month after the Daily Mail report and weeks into reporting that Bryon had reportedly entered Pure Desire Ministries, a faith-based program aimed at curbing “unwanted behaviors.” Sotomayor told the “UNCLOSETED” podcast that Bryon reached out again on WhatsApp after the iMessage. She said she replied, “You obviously are very sick. You need help,” and attached a PayPal invoice for $4,500 she said he still owed her.

“He either doesn’t know when to quit, or this is a real issue for him,” Sotomayor said on the podcast, estimating that Bryon had spent up to $45,000 on her over nine years and calling him “a loose cannon” who “just did not care about the consequences.” Asked what he meant when she raised the risk of exposure during earlier calls, she said Bryon repeatedly answered the same way: “I don’t care.”

A January Call Where Kristi Almost Walked In

Sotomayor described a moment that, on her telling, sat closer than anyone outside the call probably realized. It was January, Kristi Noem was still serving as Homeland Security secretary, and Sotomayor was upstairs on a routine call with Bryon when she heard a woman’s voice in the background ask, “Who are you talking to?” Sotomayor recalled pausing and thinking, “that’s a woman.”

The near-miss reframed the blackmail question in a different register. For Sotomayor, the risk was not theoretical. She lives about 30 minutes from an ICE detention center in Colorado and has a Hispanic surname. At the time, Kristi Noem oversaw Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “If she has any inkling of who I am, what I look like, let alone my name or number, she can find me,” Sotomayor told Uncloseted Media. “She’s the head of ICE.”

The latest disclosures also come against a backdrop of strain that was already public. At a March Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove asked Kristi Noem under oath whether she had ever had sexual relations with Corey Lewandowski, a Trump confidant who had been by her side at public events; People magazine later reported that Bryon had told an online model he was aware of his wife’s relationship with Lewandowski.

Anti-Trans Record at Home, Alleged Fantasies on the Line

The political friction that Sotomayor and Uncloseted Media both flag is the gap between Kristi Noem’s public record and what her husband is alleged to have asked for in private. As governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem signed legislation restricting gender-affirming care for minors, limiting transgender participation in women’s and girls’ sports, and allowing businesses to deny service to LGBTQ people on religious grounds.

Sotomayor told Uncloseted Media that Bryon never denounced his wife’s policies while privately describing detailed transition-related interests to her, from breast and hair implants to hormone therapy and feminization surgeries. “I knew he was in my DMs saying, ‘I want to be trans, bimbo, I want to get hair implants, I wanna get breast implants, I wanna do all of this kind of transitioning,'” she said, then added: “And then he goes on interviews and be like, ‘Oh, my wife is God’s gift to me, and she’s right in everything that she does.'”

Sotomayor said the hypocrisy was personal. She is pansexual, has gender-fluid siblings, and said the conduct at ICE under Kristi Noem’s leadership pushed her toward going public. She specifically named the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents as a turning point. “I just didn’t feel like on good conscience that I could continue talking to him,” she said. Neither Bryon nor Kristi Noem has offered a detailed public response to the latest disclosures.