House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has revealed how she received the news that her husband, Paul, had suffered a seizure, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper that she was “so scared” when Capitol Police knocked on her door.
In her first interview since the attack, Pelosi explained that she was sleeping that night in Washington, DC, after arriving the night before from San Francisco, when her doorbell rang early in the morning. “I look up, I see it’s 5 a.m. (Washington time) they must be in the wrong apartment,” she told Cooper after he asked her where she was when she got the news.
Pelosi went on to say that the doorbell rang again and then she heard “bang, bang, bang, bang, bang at the door.”
“So I ran to the door and I was really scared,” she said, describing what happened. “I see the Capitol Police and they say, ‘We have to go in and talk to you.'”
Pelosi described how she immediately thought of her children and her grandchildren.
“And I think of my children, my grandchildren. I never thought it was about Paul because, you know, I knew he wouldn’t be out, let’s say. And so they came. At the time, we didn’t even know where he was,” she said.
The violent attack on Paul Pelosi has sparked renewed concern about threats of political violence fueled by partisan hostility and increasingly aggressive political rhetoric, and has highlighted the potential vulnerability of lawmakers and their families in the current political climate.