Paul Pelosi healing, but emotional scars last, daughter says
Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is healing physically after he was bludgeoned in their San Francisco home, but the emotional scars remain, according to the couple’s youngest daughter, Alexandra Pelosi.
In the early hours of Oct. 28, an intruder broke into the couple’s home in Pacific Heights, looking for Nancy Pelosi, and instead found and hit her husband in the head with a hammer. The skull fractures required emergency surgery.
The alleged intruder, David DePape, faces attempted murder, battery, assault and a string of other charges, and is also accused of plotting to kidnap and interrogate Nancy Pelosi, a longtime Democratic party leader.
The couple’s youngest daughter told CBS News in an interview that aired Sunday morning that Paul Pelosi’s physical scars were healing, although “he looks like Frankenstein,” but “the emotional scars, I don’t know if those ever heal.”
“I don’t think it’s OK for an 82-year-old man to be attacked in his home in the middle of the night because of whatever his wife does for work,” Alexandra Pelosi said.
The youngest Pelosi said what was even harder on the family than the attack was the response from her mother’s political opponents who mocked it.
“I haven’t slept since the night my father was attacked,” Alexandra Pelosi said. “What the outside world did with that for their own political fodder is what’s much harder for us to handle as a family . ... Nobody should think it is funny that an 82-year-old man got attacked in his home, and yet a sitting governor and a wanna-be governor and members of Congress were laughing about it.”
CBS aired clips of Republican elected officials or candidates making comments about the incident at events, eliciting laughs from crowds.
“She’s losing the gavel, but finding the hammer,” Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona said with a smile in one clip, referencing Nancy Pelosi’s intent to step down from House leadership in January.
“Apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection,” Kari Lake, who lost the race for Arizona governor, joked in another.
“We’re going to send her back to go be with him in California, that’s what we’re going to do,” Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin quipped in a third.
Alexandra Pelosi said her mother’s response is to lean into her faith in America, God and the Democratic Party — even though her daughter said she doesn’t believe in the future of America anymore.
The documentary filmmaker spoke to CBS to promote her new movie chronicling Nancy Pelosi’s life, family and political career, which will air on HBO this month.
The world already saw some footage that Alexandra Pelosi filmed of her mother during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, aired during a recent congressional committee investigating the incident.
Alexandra Pelosi told CBS that when her mother was running for Congress, she asked her youngest daughter, the last of five children at home, for permission to do so. The then-16-year-old told her mom to “get a life,” and go for it, but decades later, sitting in the ICU with her injured father, Alexandra Pelosi said she wouldn’t let her mother do it today.
Paul Pelosi pushed back, though, defending his wife’s work, his daughter said.
“My father still says it was worth it, that she got to live her dreams,” Alexandra Pelosi said.