CNN
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The violent attack on Paul Pelosi led to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to step down as House Democratic leadership after the family decided with him in the intensive care unit that he was “done,” her daughter detailed in an in-depth interview with CNN on Tuesday. the morning
“You have to make sense of this in your mind. You have to come to terms with the fact that an 82-year-old man is sleeping in his own bed and is attacked in his own home. And I don’t care how you vote. I don’t care what your political affiliations are. It’s not fair in any way,” Alexandra Pelosi told CNN’s Don Lemon in an exclusive interview on “CNN This Morning.”
“It’s just, at some point, you’re just done. After my dad was attacked, that was it. We were sitting in the ICU, and we were just saying, ‘We’re done,'” she added.
Alexandra Pelosi, a documentary filmmaker, spent years filming her mother behind the scenes for her film “Pelosi in the House,” released Tuesday on HBO Max. Nancy Pelosi announced last month that she would step down from her leadership post after leading House Democrats for two decades. The decision comes just weeks after a male assailant attacked her husband with a hammer at the couple’s San Francisco home.
The documentary details how Nancy Pelosi stayed on message as leader of the House Democratic caucus amid several bills where she needed to get votes twice — including passing the Affordable Care Act and getting her own vote for speaker. It partly focuses on the behind-the-scenes horror as Nancy Pelosi and her staff hid from the U.S. Capitol rioters on January 6, 2021, many of whom burst into the California Democrat’s office looking for her and trashed her.
Alexandra Pelosi said she believes the GOP’s toxic rhetoric ultimately contributed to her father’s attack in the early hours of October 28 and her mother’s decision not to seek a leadership post in the upcoming Congress.
The responses of some Republicans in the wake of the attacks, she said, were “inexcusable.”
“What I do know is that the way Republicans responded to this attack was inexcusable. The jokes. You saw the jokes. The governor of Virginia, the wannabe governor of Arizona, the congressmen, were joking about an 82-year-old man being attacked in his own home. I don’t see how that’s excusable,” she said, referring to comments made by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
“So, for me, the toxic media landscape is very difficult to try – I don’t know. I just, I don’t know how to talk about this without going so dark.
Youngkin eventually sent a handwritten note to Nancy Pelosi apologizing for her remarks,
“If I watched Fox News, I would hate Nancy Pelosi too, I get it,” said Alexandra Pelosi. “You don’t have to support his politics. You have to at least say, well, she’s spent 35 years doing this. Her husband, he looks like Frankenstein here. She finished. She is done.
Alexandra Pelosi said 35 years ago her mother asked her if she could run for office and she gave her blessing. After the attack on his father, he looks at him differently.
“He says, ‘Mommy has a chance to run for Congress, but I won’t do it unless I have your permission.’ And I said, ‘May the mother live.’ Right? What teenage girl doesn’t want her mom to get out of the house? Go right? So, we’re there in the ICU and I tell her, ‘If I knew 35 years from now where this was going to end, I’d tell you. Never would have given my blessing to run in the first place.’
She added: “Now my father, coming out of what he’s been through, says to me, ‘You can’t say that. You have to say that if you came to me today in this toxic environment of social media, you wouldn’t have your permission. Give it. But you can’t say the last 35 years of your life, I’m going to erase it because of this one incident.’ So that’s what we’re wrestling with.
“Was it all worth it? For my family? What did we go through? Was it worth it?” she told Lemon. “Now, my parents would say yes, my dad, after it’s passed, he’d say yes. And my mother, of course, would say, ‘I’m proud of my scars. ‘ Because she is proud of the life she lives. But for family, families are the ones who pay the highest price for this kind of life.
