Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez detailed the “extremely traumatizing” moment she thought she was going to die and how she was forced to hide when pro-Trump rioters stormed into her office after breaching the security of Capitol building on 6 January.
The Democrat went live on Instagram Monday night, saying she hid in in the office of Representative Katie Porter as the rioters yelled from outside and banged the doors, trying to break in.
Walking the viewers through the details on the day of the riots, Mr Ocasio-Cortez said she first hid behind the bathroom door within her inner office when someone began to bang her office’s door.
“I just hear, ‘where is she?’, ‘where is she’,” she said enacting how she stood in fear. “And this was the moment, I thought everything was over”.
Through the hinge of the door, she saw a man wearing a black beanie opening her office door and “I thought I was going to die”, she recalled.
However, the man was a Capitol police officer, who the congresswoman didn’t realise “was there to help us” during that moment.
The officer asked Mr Ocasio-Cortez and her staffer to go to another building but didn’t specify where.
Panicked with the chaos and loud noises, they ran to colleague Katie Porter’s office – who is Democrat of California – and barricaded the office with furniture against the door.
She was provided with jacket and sneakers in Ms Porter’s office “to blend in with the crowd” and recalled in the live chat that she was running in the building wearing her heels.
Ms Porter appeared on MSNBC, recalling the congresswoman saying: “I hope I get to be a mom, I hope I don’t die today.”
She found sneakers for New York Democrat in case she “needed to literally run for her life.”
At one point, Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s voice broke with emotion as she appeared to tear up.
“I felt that if this was the journey that my life was taking, that, I felt that things were going to be OK, and that, you know, I had fulfilled my purpose,” she said as she got emotional narrating the ordeal.
“And I haven’t told many people that in my life. But when we go through trauma, trauma compounds on each other,” she said.
Eventually, the lawmaker made out safely but said those ask to move on from such moments and tell to forget, were “using the same tactics of every other abuser who just tells you to move on.”
She said it the same tactic as “of that man who touched you inappropriately at work, telling you to move on.”
“We cannot move on without accountability. We cannot heal without accountability,” she said.
