Longtime friends and neighbors of Bryon and Kristi Noem said they were shocked and heartbroken that his private life became tabloid fodder, with some flat-out refusing to believe the mild-mannered insurance salesman was leading a double life.
“I grew up playing ball with Bryon,” Kevin Ruesink in the small town of Castlewood, South Dakota told the New York Times.
“I’ve never known him to be part of stuff like that. I don’t believe that at all.”
He surmised that the salacious images published Tuesday by the Daily Mail that showed Noem wearing inflated balloons as cartoonishly oversized fake breasts “must have been AI.”
While the pictures, which Noem reportedly shared with fetish models, prompted laughter or jokes from many, the prevailing attitude in the couple’s hometown was decidedly muted and more compassionate in nature.
“I am sorry that Bryon is now the subject of so much attention himself, and for any embarrassment he’s experiencing,” Nancy Turbak said about the publicity Noem’s behind-closed-doors sexual predilections invited.
“He never asked for the public life in the first place, and I know him to be a kind and decent man. I wish he were not going through this,” said Turbak, a former Democratic state senator who now runs a law office out of a former post office in Watertown.
The sympathy wasn’t across the board, however, with some locals telling the outlet the ousted DHS secretary brought the humiliation upon herself through her high-profile job with the Trump administration.
“People know Bryon as the supportive husband who worked to maintain a normal family life as Kristi’s profile skyrocketed,” said real estate appraiser Brad Johnson, who also writes a local newspaper column.
“It shows the price of power and fame is very high. But Kristi invited this type of coverage by her actions at the Department of Homeland Security.”
An unidentified man at a gas station just outside Castlewood saw the reporting about Bryon Noem’s double life and shook his head in disbelief.
“Such a nice man,” he told the outlet. “It just tears me up.”
Kristi Noem told The Post through a statement that she was “devastated” by the revelation, and that her family was “blindsided.”
