Aleksander Reed "Alek" Skarlatos (10 October 1992-) was an American US Army National Guard veteran and Republican politician from Oregon.
Biography[]
Aleksander Reed Skarlatos was born in Castro Valley, California in 1992, the son of a Greek immigrant and his American wife. He was raised in Carmichael, Sacramento, Fair Oaks, and then in Roseburg, Oregon, and he served in the US Army in the Afghanistan War from 2012 to 2017. On 21 August 2015, he and two of his friends stopped Ayoub el-Khazzani from carrying out a mass shooting on a Thalys train en route to Paris from Brussels, for which he was awarded the Soldier's Medal from President Barack Obama and the Legion of Honor from French President Francois Hollande. He later placed third on Dancing with the Stars, and he entered politics in 2018 as the Republican candidate for Douglas County Commissioner. In 2020, he challenged the Democrat Peter DeFazio in OR-4 in the US House of Representatives.