Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Mace have been sparring on Twitter over their experiences during last month’s deadly Capitol insurrection.
After Ocasio-Cortez detailed the riot from her perspective in a widely-viewed Instagram livestream on Monday, Mace said “egregious doesn’t even begin to cover” her account of what happened.
She tweeted on Wednesday: “My office is 2 doors down. Insurrectionists never stormed our hallway.”
In the livestream, Ocasio-Cortez told her followers that she was forced to take refuge inside her bathroom when a stranger entered her office during the riot. Critics quickly took issues with the Democrat’s safety concerns and some diminished her story, saying that she had not been in the congressional building at the time—remarks she called “the latest manipulative take on the right.”
When Mace, a Republican, tweeted again on Thursday that no rioters stormed the hallway the lawmakers share, Ocasio-Cortez called it “a deeply cynical & disgusting attack.”
“As the Capitol complex was stormed & people were being killed, none of us knew in the moment what areas were compromised,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “You previously told reporters yourself that you barricaded in your office, afraid you’d be hurt.”
She included a screenshot of an article from The State in which Mace said she barricaded herself inside her office during the attack and decided to sleep in the office that night out of fears of retaliation from Trump supporters.
Mace, a freshman congressional member, voted to certify the results of the presidential election.
“She said her children keep texting her asking if the protestors are gone,” The State‘s Caitlin Byrd wrote of Mace’s account.
“This is what you were saying just a few weeks ago,” Ocasio-Cortez told Mace. “Now you’re contradicting your own account to attack me for Fox News clicks. It’s honestly pretty sad to see you turn around like this and throw other people under the bus. Thought you’d be better.”
Mace quickly fired back, saying she never discounted the Democrat’s fear. She tweeted: “We were ALL terrified that day. I’m stating the fact that insurrectionists were never in our hallway… because they weren’t. I deal with facts. Unlike you apparently.”
“FACT: Insurrectionists weren’t in our hallways. It’s your eagerness to politicize absolutely ANYTHING that deserves condemnation,” Mace continued in another tweet.
Republican congressional candidate Nancy Mace speaks to the crowd at an event with Sen. Lindsey Graham at the Charleston County Victory Office during Grahams campaign bus tour on October 31, 2020 in Charleston, South Carolina. Mace fired back at Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over Twitter on Thursday, accusing the Democrat of making Mace’s experience of the Capitol riot “political.” Michael Ciaglo/Stringer
In another tweet, Ocasio-Cortez, who revealed she is a survivor of sexual assault on Monday, accused Mace of minimizing her story and argued that Mace’s rhetoric damages survivors of assault or trauma from coming forward.
“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?” the congresswoman tweeted.
Mace called out the representative for being political writing, “in typical @AOC fashion, you’re making this political, even going as far as saying I don’t ‘hear’ victims of assault — ME, of all people. You don’t know my story. SMH. Just stop it.”
In April 2019, Mace publicly broke her silence about being raped at the age of 16 when an abortion bill was being advanced in South Carolina’s legislature.
“For some of us who have been raped, it can take 25 years to get up the courage and talk about being a victim of rape,” she told her colleagues.
Newsweek reached out to the offices of Mace and Ocasio-Cortez for comment, but did not hear back before publication.
