A spokesperson for Glamour magazine has responded to a claim made by Sheri Boelter in a story about the Tumbleweed Runaway Program that we published Wednesday.
Boelter, the director of the nonprofit agency, was featured by Glamour last November as one of “50 Phenomenal Women of the Year,” and she told Last Best News, in a tape-recorded interview, that she did not provide Glamour with the information used in her profile.
“If you ask Glamour magazine where they got their information, they Googled it,” she said.
Mistrella Murphy, a spokesperson for Glamour in New York, wrote to Last Best News on Friday and asked us to publish this statement:
“The information in question was provided by Boelter to our writer, and the magazine has an email transcript of the exchange.”
In its profile of Boelter, Glamour printed an anecdotal account of a frigid evening in February 2014 when the drop-in center at Tumbleweed was supposedly crowded with homeless teens. Variations of the same story had been told at Tumbleweed’s annual fundraiser last October and in Noise & Color, a local magazine, in November.
The account in Glamour read: “On one particular night last year when the temperature hit 26 degrees below zero, 68 teens showed up at the organization’s drop-in center, where they knew they would find food, shelter from the cold, and one other life essential—hope.”
Boelter later said that 70 was the total number of youths “with no safe place to go this winter,” and still later said that Tumbleweed’s database showed the number was actually 80.
She and Paul Collins, chairman of the Tumbleweed board, said the anecdote delivered at the annual fundraiser, putting all the teens in the center on one night—and which included a statement that 13 of those teens sold their bodies to stay warm—resulted from a misunderstanding.
