Who is Warren challenger John Deaton? Here are highlights from his wild, sometimes raunchy memoir

If you don’t own Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, you might be unfamiliar with John Deaton, the Republican challenging Sen. Elizabeth Warren for her seat in the U.S. Senate.

The cryptocurrency lawyer triumphed in his primary last month over a Quincy city councilor and an outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump to secure the GOP nomination.

Both Warren and Deaton are lawyers, but that might be where the similarities end. Deaton grew up poor in “the hood” near Detroit, which he likened to war-torn Ukraine. He then went to law school in Boston in 1992 and joined the Marines, as detailed in his 2023 memoir “Food Stamp Warrior.”

“Food Stamp Warrior” was published by Brass Knuckle Books, Deaton’s own publishing company launched in September of last year. BKB’s name might hint at the book’s content. By his own description, Deaton had a penchant for violence from a young age.

“I’ve been in probably seventy-five to a hundred fights since the age of six,” Deaton writes in “Food Stamp Warrior.” “I believe in violence, but only when necessary.”

When the book was written, Deaton still lived “smack dab in the middle of suburbia” in Rhode Island. He’s since moved to Bolton, Massachusetts, and launched his campaign against Warren in February of this year.

The book mentions Trump once, but Deaton doesn’t delve much deeper into political issues. While he discusses topics like poverty and cryptocurrency, the memoir doesn’t cover his political platform.

“If anything, I’m the antithesis of Donald Trump. You’ll never catch me being flashy or anything like that. I honestly think the coolest thing in the world is when you’re the richest person in the room and no one knows it,” Deaton writes.

His 300-page memoir tells a unique and sometimes scandalous story of his upbringing. Here are some takeaways.

Deaton grows up in Detroit amid sexual violence, drugs

Deaton had a rocky upbringing, according to the memoir. During his time in Highland Park, he was surrounded by drugs and violence. As the one of the only white kids in school, 9-year-old Deaton apparently used brass knuckles to beat his bully.

“He was going in and out of consciousness, spitting out teeth and blood,” Deaton writes about one fight. “For the first time in my life, I saw fear in people’s eyes when they looked at me. More importantly, I also felt respect.”

Deaton writes he was repeatedly raped between the ages 9 and 11 by a man he only referred to as a “monster.” The man, who was a stranger in his neighborhood, took him into “his abandoned child rape centers,” Deaton writes, and threatened to kills his mother if he told anyone. Deaton said the first person he told about the rapes was his therapist at age 49.

He also described watching his mother get stabbed during a robbery and seeing his best friend Derek killed during a drug deal gone wrong.

He describes sexual exploits, including allegedly having sex with his 23-year-old typing teacher when he was 17. He writes that when he was 21, he began a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl, who he says lied and told him she was about to turn 17. The age of consent in Michigan is 16.

While he quickly learned the truth, the girl later moved in with him while she finished high school, at the request of her mother, Deaton writes.

“I made the inherent mistake of thinking, because she was young, I could mold her into the perfect partner,” he wrote about the statutory rape.

When asked about the sections of the memoir regarding the relationship with the 15-year-old, Deaton told Boston.com this week he doesn’t regret any of his decisions as to what he included in the book.

“I don’t regret the book. I could never regret the book because of the pouring of love, respect, admiration … [I] have gotten literally at least 500 messages, emails, phone calls,” he told Boston.com.

Deaton went to law school in Boston

The book is also full of racial slurs directed at Deaton and others, sometimes casually, sometimes derogatorily. Other homophobic, sexist, and ableist language is also woven throughout. Deaton calls himself the “n-word” multiple times and writes he sometimes felt like he “had too much black in (him) for London, (Kentucky),” where his grandparents lived.

“When I got older and started working, I realized how privileged I was solely because my skin was white,” Deaton wrote. But he also writes that “ignorance, hatred, and racism are color-blind.”

Deaton told Boston.com that he wasn’t going to censor any inappropriate language.

“This is dialogue, not today, but 40 years ago. The child rapist didn’t edit it to me, so I made a choice that I was going to give the reader an idea of what it was like,” Deaton told Boston.com, referring to slurs the rapist said. “Life isn’t edited, and neither should my book.”

In 1992, Deaton enrolled at the New England School of Law. He writes that he talked to security guards at the school to decide where in Boston to live.

“Let me ask you guys something, straight up. Where would you recommend a guy that looks like me, not live,” he asked them. When they replied: “Roxbury. Stay out of Roxbury,” he headed there, he writes in the memoir.

Deaton writes that he found work at Legal Sea Foods and describes scraping by to make it through law school. He often barely had enough money for food, he writes, and contemplated suicide.

But he graduated, and after taking the bar, served as a criminal defense lawyer and as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Marines, including in Yuma, Arizona. During this time, according to the memoir, he lied on a police report that his sister, who was struggling with substance abuse, stabbed him to lead to her arrest and save her life from overdose.

“I was a federal prosecutor, and the only other witness was a drug addict with multiple felonies under her belt, including felonious assault. They arrested her,” Deaton wrote. “Although I lied to the cops, I wasn’t under oath.”

He becomes a father, but struggles with drugs, mental health

“I was not always the most loyal boyfriend,” he said about his relationship with the woman who became his first wife, with whom he had two daughters. “I don’t judge the success by the growth of my bank account but instead, by the growth of my children.”

He struggled with abusing painkillers and, after his divorce, “went on a coke-fueled sex bender that made ‘Scarface’ look like a kid’s movie,” Deaton wrote. He said he would take home four to five women a week.

“I would go out with women in their mid-twenties, decades younger than me, and maximize fun. We’d hang out, laugh, eat well, go to clubs, and VIP sections, and, if it led to sex, it led to sex. Usually, it led to sex,” Deaton wrote.

He then sought therapy, got remarried to his former assistant, and had a third daughter. Deaton told Boston.com that his actions until this time stemmed back to the sexual abuse he suffered as a child.

“I started waking up at 3 in the morning 40 years later, crying uncontrollably about being raped as a child,” Deaton said this week. “Eventually, through those therapy sessions, I thought that it would be healing for me to just write.”

Deaton sues the SEC over its approach to cryptocurrency

The last 30 pages of Deaton’s memoir deal extensively about his experience with the “emergent world of cryptocurrency” and suing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

“A whole new world was about to be born,” Deaton wrote in the memoir, referring to crypto in 2020, “and the powers that be did not want us to know about it.”

The SEC was claiming that XRP was a security, which Deaton called government overreach, and “at worst, an inside job meant to favor a select few.”

Deaton said he was one of other lawyers who filed against the SEC, and he gained a mass of Twitter followers who appreciated his work. Eventually the court agreed to not label XRP as a security, a decision which is being appealed this month.

“What XRP holders have given me back is damn valuable,” he wrote. “They helped me reconnect with the fighter living inside me. That young boy who fought to escape Highland Park, no matter the odds.”

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Molly Farrar is a general assignment reporter for Boston.com, focusing on education, politics, crime, and more.

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