When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was reportedly barricaded inside her office during the Capitol violence on January 6, she feared she would be raped if found by those who breached the building.
At the time, scores of supporters of former President Donald Trump besieged the Capitol in a bid to prevent the US Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden's victory in the 3 November 2020 presidential election. Trump had maintained that the 2020 November election had been “rigged” against him.
FILE - In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo, smoke fills the walkway outside the Senate Chamber as rioters are confronted by U.S. Capitol Police officers inside the Capitol in Washington
© AP Photo / Manuel Balce Ceneta
The New York Democrat Representative has opened up on what she portrayed as a harrowing experience for CNN's anchor Dana Bash in "Being...AOC." This is the first episode of the new CNN series "Being...".
"I didn't think that I was just going to be killed… I thought other things were going to happen to me as well," said Ocasio-Cortez.
When the host asked her to clarify if she thought at the time that she might be raped by the mob, Ocasio-Cortez responded, "Yeah, yeah, I thought I was".
As she hid from the rioters, the US Representative for New York's 14th congressional district since 2019, also known by her initials AOC, claims she had to rely on her experience as a survivor of sexual assault to deal with the challenging moment.
“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… And for me, I felt like those skills were coming right back so that I could survive," Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview in June.
The politician described the "misogyny and the racism" that "animated" the "attack on the Capitol," saying:
"White supremacy and patriarchy are very linked in a lot of ways… There's a lot of sexualising of that violence."
Earlier in February Ocasio-Cortez shared that she had been sexually assaulted in her early 20s, in an Instagram Live video. The revelation came less than a month after the events at the Capitol.
The 31-year-old self-described democratic socialist offered little details, explaining she was prompted to respond by calls to “put January 6 behind them”.
“The reason I'm getting emotional in this moment is because these folks who tell us to move on, that it's not a big deal, that we should forget what's happened, or even telling us to apologise, these are the same tactics of abusers,” Ocasio-Cortez said in February, adding:
“I'm a survivor of sexual assault, I haven't told many people that in my life. As a survivor, I struggle with the idea of being believed. I haven’t told many people that in my life. When we go through trauma, trauma compounds on each other."
The congresswoman, who is part of the “squad” - a group of six Democratic members of the US House of Representatives that also includes fellow Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota -described in the February video being holed up in the office bathroom. She could hear people banging on doors during the breaching of the Capitol, and hearing a voice exclaim, "Where is she?"
The voice had been that of a Capitol Police officer, however, Ocasio-Cortez claimed she didn’t know that as he did not identify himself.
"There's no way that a person in that situation would have even thought that that was law enforcement. That's not how we're kind of trained into thinking," she said.
Controversy was also triggered in the media as Ocasio-Cortez had been not in the main Capitol building when the rioters breached it, but in her office at the Cannon House Office Building. The latter is linked by tunnels to the Capitol complex and was evacuated but not breached on January 6.
Rep. Nancy Mace went on Twitter to post that she was “two doors down from AOC" and no one was "storming" the hallway, amid a flurry of Republican statements criticizing Ocasio-Cortez’s lurid and ostensibly exaggerated account of those events.
Responding to the fears cited by the congresswoman in the CNN special, some users on social media expressed their support for AOC.
However, many on Twitter slammed the congresswoman’s “false narrative”.