Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Recounts How a Congressman Once Told Her 'It's a Shame' She Won
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is opening up about the hostility she faced after being elected to Congress in 2018 — hostility that, in a new interview with GQ, came in part from those in her party.
During her first days in Congress, the now 32-year-old Ocasio-Cortez told the outlet, her reception was "not the same" as her fellow newly elected Democrats. One instance, in particular, highlighted the ideological divide between the progressive lawmaker and the Democrats who had been in office for decades.
The event took place during new member orientation, when longtime congressman Joe Crowley — who was serving the remainder of his term after being beat by AOC in the primary — was on stage giving a speech.
A male member of Congress seated next to Ocasio-Cortez, seemingly not realizing who she was, gestured to Crowley, saying, "It's a real shame that that girl won."
"I turned and I said, 'You know that's me, right?'" Ocasio-Cortez recalled to GQ. "And obviously, his face turns pale."
The congresswoman felt that the sentiment was shared by others.
"It was open hostility, open hostility to my presence, my existence," she told GQ.
The tensions have waned, at least somewhat, with time, she added — but she had to prove herself.
"I feel like everybody treated me like a one-term member of Congress, and they worked to make me a one-term member of Congress," Ocasio-Cortez said in the interview. "There was a very concerted effort from the Democratic side to unseat me. And I felt a shift after my primary election, and it felt like after that election was the first time that more broadly the party started treating me like a member of Congress and not an accident."
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While she's noted a shift in how Democrats treat her, AOC told GQ that she still feels "despised."
"Others may see a person who is admired, but my everyday lived experience here is as a person who is despised," she told the outlet. "Imagine working a job and your bosses don't like you and folks on your team are suspicious of you. And then the competing company is trying to kill you."
Cruz Valdez/GQ
The New York representative has faced public scorn from Republican elected officials and supporters of former President Donald Trump, some of whom stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.
Since the riots, the congresswoman has said that she feared for her life while hiding from the rioters, telling CNN's Dana Bash last year: "I didn't think that I was just going to be killed. I thought other things were going to happen to me as well."
Asked then if she feared she was going to be sexually assaulted, the New York lawmaker told Bash, "Yeah, yeah. I thought I was."
In July 2020, Ocasio-Cortez was harshly confronted by a colleague in an altercation with fellow congressman, Republican Ted Yoho. The incident was overheard by a reporter, though Yoho has disputed that version of events.
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According to both AOC and The Hill, Yoho called the representative a "f----- bitch" as the two passed each other at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
In a statement to PEOPLE at the time, a spokesman for Yoho denied the lawmaker called Ocasio-Cortez a "f------ bitch," claiming that reports had sensationalized the "conversation."
In another instance, Washington Post staffers said they saw controversial Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene loudly and "aggressively" confront Ocasio-Cortez as she left the House chamber.
