ALEXANDRIA Ocasio-Cortez says she has been in therapy since the Capitol Riot in January and blames former President Donald Trump for the “attempted coup.”
Speaking to the Latino USA podcast on Friday, the New York representative said she is “doing therapy” and that some of her colleagues in the House are afraid to speak about the insurrection.
“I think the Trump administration had a lot of us, especially Latino communities, in a very reactive mode,” she told the radio show.
“After the 6th, I took some time and it was really [Rep] Ayanna Pressley when I explained to her what happened to me, like the day of, because I ran to her office and she was like, ‘you need to recognize trauma’,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez said that the Capitol riot was an “extraordinarily traumatizing event” that impacted members of Congress.
“It has deeply, deeply affected lawmaking, policy making and it’s very quiet, it’s not spoken about,” she told journalist Maria Hinojosa.
The 31-year-old explained that traumatic experiences are some of the things that “you have to live with for years.”
She added that she learned this after her father passed away when she was a teenager and in response to his death she had “locked” that incident away.
Ocasio-Cortez had previously described the Capitol riot as a “near-death experience.”
However, the Democrat has been accused of lying about her experience of the riot as she wasn’t in the building that was stormed.
Instead, she was in her rooms in the Cannon Office Building – half a mile from the Capitol building – which was unaffected.
The Democratic representative has also faced accusations that she lied about “almost” being killed during the riots, which she has denied.
During the siege, Ocasio-Cortez said she hid with Rep Katie Porter in her office – which is in the Cannon Building – and locked herself in the bathroom when she thought rioters had broken in.
She told how a man banged on the door of her office and repeatedly said, “Where is she?” and that she thought at the moment it could be the end of her life.
However, the man turned out to be a Capitol police officer.
