Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she has felt her life is in danger since she was first elected to Congress and is afraid to even walk her dog.
The Democratic lawmaker from New York revealed her fears in an interview with CNN’s Chris Wallace.
“Absolutely,” she said when asked if she felt her life was threatened by being a high-profile politician.
“I felt that my life has been in danger since the moment that I won my primary election in 2018. And it became especially intensified when I was first brought into Congress in 2019,” she said.
Wallace then asked the congresswoman, who strolled to re-election in last week’s midterms, if that meant she was “looking over (her) shoulder while walking down the street.”
“It means when I wake up in the morning, I hesitate to walk my dog. It means when I come home, I have to ask my fiancée to come out to where my car is to walk me to just from my car to my front door,” she told him.
“It means that there’s just … a general disposition where you kind of feel like there’s almost a static electricity around you.
“And you’re just always just looking around, your head is just on a swivel, going to a restaurant, walking down the street.”
And she added that after winning office, she felt in 2019 that she “may not see the end of the year.”
“I really felt that way,” she said.
She also took exception to Wallace’s suggestion that Americans wanted both Republicans and Democrats “to move from the fringes” and denied the two parties could be compared.
“I think a lot of people in this country may say yes, but it’s important for us to dig into the substance of what that actually means,” she said.
“As someone who is often, I think, characterised as extreme, I of course would object to that. I do not believe that I am as extreme in the way that Marjorie Taylor Greene on the Republican side is extreme.”
