Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke about her traumatic experience evacuating her office during the attack on the United States Capitol on an Instagram Live on Monday night, saying that to heal the nation needs those who played a role in inciting violence on January 6 to be held responsible.
Ocasio-Cortez said her story is one of many, but she felt compelled to tell it, as some Republicans who repeated lies that the election was “stolen” from Donald Trump asked Democrats to continue. In particular, she asked Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz resigned.
“They are trying to tell us it was no big deal. They are trying to tell us to move on without any responsibility, without telling the truth,” she continued. “What that tells me is that when they receive another window of political opportunity for them, even if they know what it means, that it will put their colleagues at risk, they will do it again.
In the live broadcast of over an hour, the New York Democrat discussed the warnings she and other members of Congress made in the days leading up to the violent Capitol insurrection and provided new details about the “very close encounter” she thought of that “was going to die”, as she revealed on an Instagram Live weeks ago.
Ocasio-Cortez also revealed that she is a sexual assault survivor and described how the trauma of one experience can be made worse by another. She also compared the tactics of those who kept Trump’s lies about the election to those of abusers.
“I think it’s important to hold this accountable because we know that … when they say, ‘we can just move on’,” what they are really saying, she continued, is, “we can just forget about this so I can do it again without recourse. ‘”
Almost a week before the attack, Ocasio-Cortez said she started receiving text messages from other members of Congress saying she needed to be prepared for violence on the day of the Electoral College certification. These warnings were augmented by his own experiences of being released to the public in Washington DC in the two days before the attack.
On January 6, when Trump supporters began to clash with police outside the Capitol, Ocasio-Cortez was looking on his phone for a place to have lunch for her and her legislative director when they suddenly heard someone knocking on her door. office. She said there were no screams or voices identifying who was there, just the sound of violent knocking, “as if someone is trying to break down the door”.
She ran through the office and entered the bathroom, hiding against the wall behind the door.
“So I just start hearing those cries of, ‘Where is she? Where is she?'” Said Ocasio-Cortez. “This was the moment when I thought it was over.”
She said she believed she would die, reflecting that “if this was the journey my life was taking, I felt things were going to be okay,” she recalled, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I had fulfilled my purpose.”
But then she heard her legislative director ask her out and she knew that the man who was knocking on the door was a Capitol cop. At that time, she was not sure if he had any good intentions, saying, “The situation didn’t look good.”
“He was looking at me with enormous anger and hostility,” she said. “We were unable to read whether this was a good or bad situation.”
The officer finally told her to move to another building, but did not provide information on where members of Congress were being held, she said.
Capitol police officials did not immediately respond to BuzzFeed News’s request for comment.
Ocasio-Cortez later described how, after arriving at the other building and looking for another place to hide, she spotted Dep. Katie Porter and barricaded her office with her staff until the end of the blockade.
Speaking to MSNBC on Monday night, Porter retold how her colleague was desperately looking for a place to hide inside the office.
“I was saying, ‘Well, don’t worry. I am a mother. I’m calm. I have everything we need here. We could live here for about a month in this office. ‘ And she said, ‘I just hope to be a mother. I hope I don’t die today, “” said Porter.