A Capitol Rioter Has Become a Right-Wing Media Darling. She Just Got Arrested.

In the three years since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, more than 1,300 participants have been charged with crimes. But outside a few of the flashiest and most memorable characters from the day, most individual prosecutions have passed with little public note. Last Monday, however, the news of one arrest was met with more outrage: that of Isabella Maria DeLuca, a 24-year-old conservative influencer.

According to prosecutors, on Jan. 6, 2021, DeLuca—who was arrested on Friday—entered a set of conference rooms inside the Capitol building by climbing through a broken window. She then climbed back out and was one of several people who passed a table from a Senate terrace room to rioters outside the building. The FBI testified that rioters later used the table to attack Capitol Police.

Around 3 p.m. that day, she tweeted, “Fight back or let politicians steal an election? Fight back!” Later, according to the arrest warrant, she would express her hopes that Trump would enact martial law.

After the news of her charges broke, DeLuca posted that she was “facing the unwarranted targeting and persecution by the DOJ and FBI at the direction of the Biden Administration, like most J6ers.” She added, “This experience for me, has only served to shed light on the challenges conservative Americans, Christians, and Trump supporters face daily.”

Not long afterward, her defenders settled on a particular argument. “Just so everyone knows the rules,” one person posted, “touching a table near a Capitol window is a criminal offense because someone may later use the table in a crime.” Another: “So now you can be arrested and charged for ‘TOUCHING A TABLE.’ ” And another: “I guess ‘touching a table’ is a threat to democracy. This is asinine.”

Her crime was not, of course, “touching a table.” DeLuca was charged with theft of government property, disorderly conduct, and entering a restricted area. Video from that day shows her helping to remove the table from inside the Capitol.

But that didn’t stop people from arguing that she was a victim of political persecution. Some on social media claimed that the Biden administration had gone after DeLuca specifically to send a message because of her social media presence; she has more than 343,000 followers on X. (DeLuca also, in her social media, highlighted that she was being attacked while “illegals” were coming into the country and claimed that more-serious criminals were escaping justice. “I wish the seven agents that came to arrest me were instead searching for missing children and arresting child sex traffickers,” she posted. “Apparently, that’s asking for too much.”)

The narrative took hold. Elon Musk, responding to a post from the right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong, replied on X that “the Jan 6 prosecutions have gone too far.” DeLuca’s GiveSendGo (a crowdfunding platform favored by conservatives) has now raised $19,000 for her legal defense, boosted by calls for conservatives to defend their own.

This popular response was likely to some degree because DeLuca is young, blond, and conventionally attractive. DeLuca is a traditional influencer in this regard: She knows to boost her conservative political opinions with selfies and expertly posed photos directed at what appears to be her target audience of young male conservatives. Photos of her, sometimes in swimsuits, pop up in subreddits dedicated to hot conservative women. Her most popular post on X, by far, is a video of her baking: Captioned “brown butter caramel cake is the messiest thing I’ve made thus far,” it has 13 million views, in large part because of the misogynistic backlash to the tight T-shirt she’s wearing in the video. The video spurred a micro news cycle on the right after some influential viewers accused it of amounting to pornographic content. She quickly hit more mainstream media when she shared screen grabs of former San Francisco Giants player Aubrey Huff flirting with her—following his remarks that, for women like her, “sexuality is all they bring to the table.”

But DeLuca is a savvy social media user, one who operates as a specific kind of conservative influencer: a brash, outspoken, attractive woman professing traditional ideas about gender norms, with her sexuality often framed as being reserved for a theoretical “future husband.” (Some misogynists who believe that these influencers are being cynically opportunistic have termed this archetype the “tradthot.”)

“Dear future husband,” she posted in July, to 2.5 million views, “instead of spending my weekends out at bars and parties, I stay home and learn new recipes I can cook for you one day. You can thank me in kisses later. Love, Your future wife.”

She mixed that in with more explicitly political posts (“I can’t wait until Trump begins the biggest mass deportation in United States history”); sponsored posts about the film Cabrini from the Sound of Freedom’s Angel Studios; and exhortations for women to “have lots of children,” grow their own food, shoot guns, eat meat, and homeschool their children.

After her arrest, DeLuca reshared a post on X confirming that she enjoys her particular place in the conservative influencer ecosystem: “She’s hot, has heavy D’s, can bake and she’s now being politically persecuted by Biden’s regime. Wifey material right there.”

But to reduce DeLuca to her looks is to ignore the amount of strategizing she has put into becoming a big name. DeLuca has been posting political and conservative Christian content since her teenage years. But her breakout moment came on Oct. 17, 2020, during a counterprotest against the Women’s March in Washington.

At the end of that day, she posted photos of herself wearing a neck brace, with bruising on her face and an apparently bloodied mouth. DeLuca wrote on Twitter that she “just got punched in the face and choked by two women because I was holding a Trump flag here at the Supreme Court.”

But video from the time shows DeLuca shoving a woman with both hands, retrieving a flag from the ground, and walking aggressively toward the woman she had shoved. There’s no video of what happened before DeLuca shoved the woman, so we don’t know what instigated the fight; it’s possible the woman had forcefully taken the flag out of DeLuca’s hands. What we do know is that DeLuca appeared to escalate the fight, at the least, and that she lied when she claimed on Twitter that she “put my hand up to retrieve [the flag] from the ground so I didn’t get kicked while I was down on the ground.”

Regardless, the experience launched DeLuca into minor right-wing stardom. She was written up as the victim of rabid left-wing violence by publications like the Blaze. Fox News reported DeLuca’s claims that Facebook had removed her account of the alleged assault.

And this appears not to have been the first time she had gotten attention for being the alleged subject of an attack. In September 2019, right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk posted a photo of himself with DeLuca. “This is Isabella,” he wrote on Twitter. “She was beaten up and dragged through a parking lot for wearing a Trump shirt. The media didn’t report or cover this hate crime.”

She’s been slowly growing a presence in right-wing media in the years since her Women’s March experience, appearing on Newsmax and podcasts. And as the blog Angry White Men noted, she has appeared twice on a Rumble show hosted by white nationalist Stew Peters. In those appearances, she blamed feminism and other elements of the left for the “declining white majority”—a view that fits with a number of her posts on social media, including one about white pride.

Meanwhile, DeLuca has taken more conventional pathways into Republican Party politics. In his 2019 post, Kirk noted that DeLuca was president of a Talking Point USA chapter.

At the time of the Women’s March, she was outreach director for Republicans for National Renewal, a populist, pro-Trump advocacy group. (The group called Black Lives Matter a “terrorist organization” at the time of DeLuca’s alleged assault, despite there being no evidence anyone involved in the incident represented BLM; one woman present wore a shirt that featured Black icons.) DeLuca would go on to volunteer as a​​ “Turning Point ambassador” for the Tempe, Arizona–based TPUSA branch and in 2023, to speak at a Second Amendment conference in Arlington, Virginia. (She also worked as an unpaid social media associate for a foreign policy group called the Gold Institute for International Strategy. Last Monday, the organization cut ties with her.)

DeLuca gained more legitimate political credentials through her work with actual lawmakers. Just three months after the Capitol riot, she began a stint as an intern at the office of then–Rep. Lee Zeldin, a major Trump ally who in 2022 became the GOP’s nominee for New York governor. This would make her the first known Jan. 6 insurrectionist to take a job in Congress. Then, in 2022, she interned for Rep. Paul Gosar, another election denier. According to Politico, both Gosar’s and Zeldin’s offices said they had no knowledge of DeLuca’s Jan. 6 activities; Zeldin’s office said she had only “volunteered unpaid to help a staff member in the district.”

So, DeLuca is no mere social media poster: She’s a woman who learned the specific pathways—through right-wing connections, unpaid labor, weaponizing victimhood, and gaming the attention economy—to reach a level of political power without having to put in years of drudge work.

The support DeLuca has seen on social media reflects those efforts—Kirk, for example, passionately defended her on his podcast, railing against “typical Soviet-style indictment B.S.” aiming to “chill the growing young conservative movement in this country” and labeling her one of the “modern-day hostages being held by the regime.”

But it also shows just how much the American public has changed its opinion on Jan. 6 since the initial aftermath, when GOP members of Congress and mainstream Republican pundits were distancing themselves from the violence. Today, when one-quarter of Americans believe that the FBI was involved in instigating or escalating that day’s events, many politicians and media figures have changed their tune, arguing that the genuine Trump supporters there were merely expressing their political beliefs and that they are victims of a “two-tiered justice system” meant to crack down on their free speech. Trump himself has promised, on social media, that among his first acts as president will be to “free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!”

It’s too soon to know if DeLuca will be able to capitalize on that narrative. But based on the energy of her defenders, it seems very possible that DeLuca is savvy enough to use her momentary fame as a criminal defendant to secure a prominent future place in the conservative media sphere.