After Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram diatribe about her experience during last month’s storming of the Capitol, her Republican neighbor just two offices down in the Cannon House Office Building pointed out her recollection was embellished. Rep. Nancy Mace, the freshman South Carolina congresswoman, noted on Twitter that no insurrectionists made it to their hallway, a point that Ocasio-Cortez didn’t expressly make (she said that people she thought were rioters turned out to be U.S. Capitol Police), but that some in the media had sensationalized as fact.
In response, AOC attacked her as silencing rape survivors, given that AOC had revealed she was sexually assaulted (an assertion that had no real relation to the Capitol storming).
This is where the true damage of what @NancyMace is doing comes in.
How many survivors are watching her? Who now, seeing her, won’t get care or will feel further shame or silence? Who won’t speak up bc they know there are voices in leadership ready to minimize their experiences?
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 4, 2021
Other than Ocasio-Cortez’s usual penchant for theatrics, there’s just one major problem: Mace is a rape survivor — and one who has used her experience to help other survivors in a massively consequential way.
Back when the South Carolina legislature was debating a fetal heartbeat bill, Republicans wanted to exclude a rape and incest exception. After a quarter century of telling next to no one, Mace revealed that she was raped when she was 16 as a part of her plea to her colleagues to concede to adding the exception to the bill she otherwise supported. Although the legislature didn’t ultimately succeed at getting the bill signed into law at the time, the bill is finally about to pass the state House, after which the Republican governor is expected to sign the bill, which includes the exception Mace fought for, into law.
In an exclusive statement, Mace told the Washington Examiner: “What started as an indictment of the media turned into AOC swarming me — maybe because I’m dedicated to the facts, which she clearly knows nothing about.”
Mace proudly voted to recognize President Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and has remained a critic of those trafficking in right-wing conspiracy theories and lies. She has repeatedly beckoned the public to take the Capitol storming with the utmost seriousness, explaining exactly how scary it was to wait, unarmed, in the hopes that Capitol Police could cordon off the rioters enough to keep from breaching Cannon.
And yet, AOC just couldn’t help herself. Likening Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to sexual abusers was gross enough, even given the two Republicans’ own dereliction of duty. But to accuse an actual rape survivor, and one who used her experience to vouch for other rape survivors, of silencing other survivors is appalling.
