How did a United States senator—just out mowing his lawn—wind up in an altercation that put him in the hospital? Was it a politically motivated attack? Or was it something far more petty? To separate rumor from reality, Ben Schreckinger slipped inside Rand Paul’s gated Kentucky community, where the neighbors tried to help him solve one of the weirder political mysteries in years.
If it is possible for a man, as he's being hauled in front of a judge for his arraignment, to somehow still project an air of haughty superiority, well, that man would look like Rene Boucher did as he appeared in court just over a week ago.
A retired anesthesiologist, Boucher—who stands accused of a bizarre beating earlier this month that left his neighbor, the Kentucky senator Rand Paul, with six broken ribs—strode into the jammed courtroom wearing a well-pressed blue suit. His back was ramrod straight, his head was held high, his nose not quite in the air. Seven other accused criminals who joined Boucher on the court's docket that morning had been schlepped to the courthouse from the adjoining county jail in orange jumpsuits.
Not Boucher. He'd stayed the night before at a friend's place—all the easier to comply with the court order requiring him to remain at least 200 feet away from his badly injured neighbor, whose house sits exactly 269 feet from Boucher's own.
A slight man, Boucher spent only a few moments inside the courtroom, enough time to approach the bench and plead not guilty to one count of misdemeanor assault. He and his lawyer then hustled toward the door, leaving behind them a pack of reporters and a still-lingering mystery: What exactly happened earlier this month in Rand Paul's yard, and why?
The apparent scuffle was as odd as it was rare. Not since 1856, when a cane-wielding congressman named Preston Brooks nearly killed the abolitionist Charles Sumner, had a sitting United States senator suffered such a violent drubbing. Brooks at least had the decency to perform his beat-down in front of witnesses in the Senate chamber, and to announce his motive: a beef over slavery. There's been no such clarity in the weeks since Rand Paul was sent to the hospital.
In the days after the dust-up, local newspapers suggested a long-simmering spat over yard care. But the senator's own spokesman quickly refuted the notion that the two men had been feuding: He said Paul hadn't had a conversation with Boucher or any of his family members in "over a decade." Instead, right-leaning outlets in Washington—and Paul himself—have pushed the idea that the alleged assault was actually motivated by politics. Specifically, the theory goes, it was Boucher's "socialist" beliefs and his antipathy for Donald Trump that led him to confront his Republican neighbor. (The FBI is said to be looking into that claim, which, if true, could turn Boucher's simple assault charge into a trickier federal case.)
But to many people in Bowling Green, there's nothing about this that smacks of politics. From the locals who know both men well, a portrait emerges of something much more personal and petty: a clash between a big-deal politician, living in a small town and rarely realizing the ways in which he rubs people the wrong way, and his neighbor, a proud, fiery, and meticulous former doctor. In other words, something far less Sumner-Brooks than Hatfield-McCoy. "It's like the old hillbilly feud over the property line," said longtime Bowling Green resident Bill Goodwin, who has known Paul for the better part of two decades and has become friends with Boucher in recent years.
On the afternoon of November 3, Paul was mowing his lawn in the well-to-do gated community where he's lived for 17 years. It's an enclave dotted with swimming pools, an artificial lake, and at least one private tennis court—a place where the Greek revival homes feature grand columns out front that support porticos and little balconies. Actually, the columns on Paul's house are rather modest by the standards of the neighborhood—a fact that doesn't escape notice. "They pick on Rand because he has the smallest one out there," one local confided in me.
According to The New York Times, he had just stepped off of his riding lawnmower when Boucher tackled him from behind. The senator apparently never heard Boucher coming because he was wearing "sound-muting earmuffs." Describing the alleged attack, Paul's spokesman, Sergio Gor, said his boss was "blindsided."
Jim Skaggs, who lives nearby (and is also one of the developers of the Rivergreen community), said that he thinks that Boucher charged at Paul from the street. From that direction, Paul's yard slopes steeply downward, toward the lake at the rear of his property. Barreling downward about 30 degrees, this imagined path would increase the force of a running tackle, perhaps explaining how a man of Boucher's diminutive stature—an acquaintance of the two men estimates that they both stand five-foot-six and weigh about 140 pounds—could do so much damage.
State police initially said that Paul had suffered a "minor injury," but reports later emerged that he had been hospitalized with five broken ribs and that the attack had left him with trouble breathing. Paul finally tweeted that he in fact had broken six ribs and suffered a "pleural effusion," an accumulation of excess liquid in his chest.
According to Tim Pritts, director of surgery at the University of Cincinnati medical school and an expert in trauma, the liquid in question was probably blood.
But even if you grant Boucher the momentum of a downhill charge, the injuries Paul suffered are extreme, according to Pritts (who hasn't treated Paul). An unarmed assault rarely results in more than a broken rib or two. The injuries Paul suffered sound to him more consistent with a car accident, or a fall down a flight of stairs—or even from the top of a building. "I've seen a few from people getting kicked by horses," added Pritts, who speculated that Paul's injuries may indicate he was stomped on while lying on the ground.
For Boucher, 59, an arrest of this sort is an unlikely claim to fame. His allegedly inflicting on his state's junior senator the type of damage more commonly associated with a horse surprised plenty of those who know him. The son of a New England gym teacher, Boucher had served as a doctor in the Army before embarking on a lucrative career in Kentucky, where he raised two bright, successful children.
But there have been setbacks for Boucher in recent years. In 2005, a bicycle accident left him with a badly injured back. He had already been tinkering with an idea for an invention to relieve pain: a vest filled with rice that could be heated in the microwave. Following his accident, he turned misery into good fortune, perfecting the vest and convincing the home-shopping network QVC to begin selling it.
Goodwin, who described Boucher as fiercely principled, said part of the motivation for inventing the vest was to reduce patients' reliance on painkiller medication. He added that Boucher once stopped working with a particular pain clinic after concluding that it was too loose in prescribing opioids, and that his own friendship with Boucher became strained for a time because of an acquaintance that Boucher was apparently convinced had occasionally smoked marijuana.
"His father taught him the old way, but he lives in a new world," Goodwin said, describing a man apparently at odds, on occasion, with those around him. (It is perhaps no wonder that Boucher has not hit it off with Paul, who has called for repealing the federal marijuana prohibition and who in college was said to take bong hits and worship a mysterious deity he called "Aqua Buddha.")
In 2008, Boucher's wife, Lisa, filed for divorce. After that, Boucher was ready to move out of the Rivergreen community, and he put his home on the market. In April 2012, a couple agreed to buy the place but then backed out at the last minute, alleging problems with the house's air-conditioning units and prompting Boucher to sue them for breach of contract. He ended up getting the $10,000 deposit the couple had put in escrow, which they had offered to forfeit from the outset anyway. According to the Daily Mail, Boucher may have been angered by Paul's decision to plant trees that now block the view of the lake once enjoyed from Boucher's house, lowering the property value. If Boucher had been a luckier man, he might be living now in happy obscurity in Florida, where his son practices law, which, according to Skaggs, had been his intention.
Instead, he's stayed put and poured a good deal of attention into his yard. A Bowling Green resident who said she's known Boucher and his ex-wife for close to a decade but asked that her name be withheld said Boucher has "some OCD issues." Others corroborate this description.
"He's kind of a neatnik in his yard," said Skaggs, the co-developer who built Rivergreen 20 years ago. "You'd see all the little clippings sitting in little plastic bags waiting for pickup every week." Indeed, on a recent afternoon, a black garbage bag filled with yard clippings still sat in Boucher's driveway in front of his three-car garage. Planters flanking the front steps and the back of the house were all neatly stacked with the same seasonal ornament: a greenish-black-and-white gourd on top of a solid white gourd on top of an orange pumpkin.
Like most everyone else in the Rivergreen development, Goodwin told me, Boucher pays in the ballpark of $150 a month for professional landscaping, while Paul insists on maintaining his yard himself. Goodwin said that part of what nagged at Boucher was the difference in grass length between his lawn and that of his libertarian neighbor's. "He had his yard sitting at a beautiful two-and-a-half, three inches thick, where Rand cuts it to the nub," Goodwin said.
Also at issue, according to Goodwin, is Paul's tendency to mow outward at the edge of his property, spraying his clippings into Boucher's yard. Boucher, he said, has asked Paul to instead mow inward when near the boundary line, and even sought help from the Rivergreen Homeowners Association but has gotten no relief.
Goodwin recalled picking up Boucher, a devout Catholic, at his home after church one Sunday afternoon several years ago. Boucher had confronted Paul about his yard-maintenance practices a few minutes before Goodwin's arrival, to no avail, and Goodwin saw Boucher grow agitated as they both watched Paul blow grass onto his lawn. "I've asked him and I've asked him and I've asked him," Goodwin recalls Boucher fuming. "How long can you sit there taking someone plucking a hair out of your nose?" Goodwin asked. "How long could you take that before losing your temper?"
Those close to Paul don't recognize the description of a man who flouts his neighbors' wishes. "[Rand] was loved by his patients and is loved by his neighborhood," said Jennifer Wentworth, Paul's partner for 10 years in a shared ophthalmology practice and a neighbor of both men. "I do not know the details of what transpired between he and Rene Boucher, but I do know he did not deserve to be assaulted in his own yard."
But across Bowling Green, sympathy for either man appears to be in short supply. Goodwin described them as "two little shits" who have brought embarrassment upon the town. "You're talking about two of them that I'd like to turn over my knee," he said. "That's what the folks would like to do. Give them both a paddling and send them on their way."
Goodwin, in his capacity as a youth-baseball umpire, said he once ejected Paul from a Babe Ruth baseball game around 2000 when Paul, who was coaching one of his sons, grew argumentative over balls and strikes. (Paul's spokesman, Gor, said Goodwin's account was "100 percent absolutely false" and that Paul had never been ejected from a game.)
At Hilligans, a popular sports bar by the campus of Western Kentucky University, the same woman who told me about Boucher's fussiness toward his yard also called him a "hothead" and suggested he may have a sort of "little man's syndrome."
"He gets really stuck in his own head, and he's known for his temper," she said. At the same time, "Rand Paul's not the most-liked man in Bowling Green," she confided.
A waitress who has served Paul more than once over the years and who asked that her place of employment not be specified, described serving Paul last year following an event related to his re-election campaign.
"Hi, how are you?" the waitress recalled greeting him, to which he responded, curtly, "Water?"
I met another man, at the bar of the Bowling Green Hyatt, who said he knows both men and was in a position to shed insight on Paul's career as an eye doctor. He told me that Paul had a reputation for being difficult to work with, and that when he served as an eye doctor at Graves Gilbert clinic, he put up a fuss over the pooling of expenses among the doctors. This was confirmed by another person who worked with Paul at the clinic, who told me that a decade ago Paul wanted to take time off to help out on his father's quixotic presidential bid and balked at having to pay for fixed expenses while he was away, prompting him to leave the clinic to strike out on his own. "He's a very independent-minded fellow, and I'll leave it at that," said Craig Heckman, the clinic's assistant administrator, who declined to comment on the circumstances of Paul's departure.
Paul's reputation as an excellent doctor is unquestioned. And the man selling hot dogs under a Japanese maple in front of the clinic described Paul, to whom he has delivered pizzas in the past, as an excellent tipper, always good for four or five bucks.
At the upscale pizza joint Novo Dolce, a professor at Western Kentucky struggling to make sense of the assault offered to her friend the theory that there must be some as-yet-unreported financial dispute between the two. Later, at the mention of Boucher, an older man pointed to his temple to indicate that Boucher is nuts, while his wife protested that she knows Boucher better and that he's "just different, that's all."
Nobody I came across in Bowling Green bought the explanation that had been floated in Washington—that political differences must have prompted the assault. Goodwin described Boucher, a New England Catholic, as a "Kennedy Democrat" and others noted his staunch, left-leaning views. But nobody thought that he took particular exception to Paul's politics or that he would confront the senator about the affairs of government.
When I spoke with Boucher's ex-wife, she batted away a number of theories, including the idea that the dispute related to Paul's office. "It's not politics. It's not money. It's not women or sex or infidelity," she said. "So pick what it is."
What then explains the lingering insistence that Paul was the victim of a politically motivated assault? Last week, the conservative Washington Examiner published statements from seven neighbors eager to praise Paul, often in canned language ("As a friend, neighbor and senator, Rand has been first class in every way"), and someone provided the newspaper with screenshots of anti–Donald Trump messages that Boucher had apparently posted on social media, then deleted. Meanwhile, Breitbart called reports of the yard feud, which had appeared in the Bowling Green Daily News and the Louisville Courier-Journal, "fake news." Gor did not respond when I asked whether the senator's office played any role in facilitating the Examiner and Breitbart stories, but Paul promoted both of them on his Twitter feed.
And late last week, Fox News reported that "Senator Paul has been told to expect federal charges against the suspect." Such charges would require the government to allege the attack was not a simple assault, but instead somehow related to Paul's role as a senator. A political motive would conveniently sweep aside any talk of Paul being an imperfect neighbor, and it would generate more sympathy. Playing up that idea at a time when real political violence is on the rise in the United States—and left and right are both eager to cast the blame for that on the other side—has the potential to make Paul a cause célèbre in parts of the Republican Party that have often treated this independent-minded fellow as an outcast.
Of course, as a libertarian icon, Rand Paul might, one would think, be outraged by any attempt to make a federal case out of a matter that does not appear to warrant the attention of federal prosecutors. But as the man at the bar at the Bowling Green Hyatt said, after seven years in Washington, "Rand's learned how to be a politician."
Ben Schreckinger is a GQ correspondent in Washington, D.C.
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