Ocasio-Cortez Reveals She Feared She Would Be Raped During Capitol Riots

In a startling revelation, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, opened up about how she feared she would be raped and murdered by rioters during the Capital insurrection on Jan. 6.

Ocasio-Cortez was speaking to CNN about how she hid as rioters banged her office doors. "I didn't think that I was just going to be killed," Ocasio-Cortez told anchor Dana Bash. "I thought other things were going to happen to me as well."

On asked whether she feared she would be raped by the rioters, Ocasio-Cortez said, "Yeah, yeah, I thought I was," attributing the feeling to "misogyny and the racism that are so deeply rooted and animated in that attack."

"White supremacy and patriarchy are very linked in a lot of ways," Ocasio-Cortez said. "There's a lot of sexualizing of that violence."

"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," she added.

The congresswoman had in February revealed that she is a survivor of sexual assault while recalling her personal experience during the insurrection. She had then described how she locked herself in the bathroom in her office, listening to banging on doors.

Though she later heard a voice demand, "Where is she?" Ocasio-Cortez said she did not know it was a Capitol Police officer 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 added.

Ocasio-Cortez also opened up to Bash about her first term in Washington as "very painful." "I came in and I unseated an incumbent that, while may not have been resonant in our community, was very popular inside those, you know, smoke-filled rooms," Ocasio-Cortez said.

"I took away a friend (from those members). And so, I walked in into a very cold environment, even within my own party."

Ocasio-Cortez trounced veteran Joseph Crowley in the New York primary in 2018. A socialist, Ocasio-Cortez was a former organizer for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and had a strong social media presence. Her viral introduction video had then established her as "a woman of the people, playing up her working-class roots."