AOC says she feared being raped during Capitol riot

‘I didn’t think that I was just going to be killed. I thought other things were going to happen to me as well,’ AOC says

During the Capitol riot, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t just fear being killed, she was also afraid of being raped if the pro-Trump mob had managed to find her.

“I didn’t think that I was just going to be killed,” she told CNN’s chief political correspondent Dana Bash. “I thought other things were going to happen to me as well.”

“It sounds like what you’re telling me right now is that you didn’t only think that you were going to die, you thought that you were going to be raped,” Ms Bash said to a nodding Ms Ocasio-Cortez.

“Yeah, I thought I was,” she said. The Queens lawmaker has previously said that she’s a survivor of sexual assault. She said her past traumas was on her mind as she hid in her office during the insurrection. Her office is in the Cannon building, which is across the street from the Capitol but is connected to the building that was breached on 6 January via underground tunnels.

“Survivors have a very strong set of skills. And the skills that are required as a survivor, the tools that you build for resilience, they come back in right away,” Ms Ocasio-Cortez said in June. “And for me, I felt like those skills were coming right back so that I could survive.”

She said the Capitol siege was “animated” by “misogyny” and “racism”.

“White supremacy and patriarchy are very linked in a lot of ways,” Ms Ocasio-Cortez said. “There’s a lot of sexualizing of that violence.”

About a month after the Capitol riot, Ms Ocasio-Cortez first revealed during an Instagram Live that she had been sexually assaulted years prior.

The 31-year-old was first elected in 2018 and won reelection in 2020.

She had just started her second term when she was forced to hide in her office bathroom as she heard banging on doors and yells of “where is she?” coming from the corridor outside.

The person later turned out to be a Capitol police officer but didn’t identify himself as one at the time.

“There’s no way that a person in that situation would have even thought that that was law enforcement,” she told CNN. “That’s not how we’re kind of trained into thinking.”

She said the decision to speak about her sexual assault in her early 20s was not “a conscious one”.

“You don’t say, ‘This is the moment. I’m going to do this now.’ It feels like something happens in the circumstances that almost propels you to, and almost forces you in a way to come forward,” Ms Ocasio-Cortez said. “Because I think a lot of survivors would rather never talk about what happened ever again.”