Photo: San Francisco Police Department via Associated Press In October 2022, David DePape attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, after breaking into the couple's home with rope, gloves and duct tape.
France Media Agency in San Francisco
Posted at 3:56 p.m.
- United States
A man who attacked with a hammer the husband of Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic leader of the United States House of Representatives, was sentenced Friday in San Francisco to 30 years in prison.
David DePape was convicted in late 2023 of entering the couple's home in San Francisco in October 2022 and fracturing Paul Pelosi's skull.< /p>
Nancy Pelosi was at the time third in state as Speaker of the House of Representatives and was regularly the target of conspiracy theories fueled by the far right.
The trial showed how Mr. DePape, an illegal Canadian carpenter with a solitary lifestyle, was immersed in a world poisoned by disinformation before taking action.
If he initially wanted to attack the parliamentarian, Nancy Pelosi was in Washington that day and not at her home in San Francisco.
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Ahead of Friday's hearing, Nancy Pelosi asked the judge to impose “a very long” sentence for this attack “which had devastating effects on three generations” of her family.
“Even today, 18 months after the intrusion and the attack, the traces of blood and break-in are impossible to avoid,” she said declared in court documents cited by the daily San Francisco Chronicle.
During his trial, the 43-year-old man recounted — sometimes in tears — how he became a avid listener of far-right podcasts.
“Breaking the kneecaps”
On social networks, he notably shared publications claiming that American elites were corrupt and engaged in pedophilia, or that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump.
On the day of the attack, he broke into the Pelosi couple's home in San Francisco with rope, gloves and duct tape.
He admitted to investigators that he planned to “break the kneecaps” of the elected official if she did not admit to the “lies” of the Democratic camp.
Paul Pelosi had managed to alert the police, who intervened at the last minute. The attack was filmed by the agents' pedestrian camera.
Happening a few days before the mid-term elections, the affair illustrated the seriousness of the effects of disinformation in the campaign, as well as the deep divisions in America.
Some members of the Republican Party had mocked the attack or had expressed a certain skepticism despite the images.
The boss of erase — a conspiracy theory intended to minimize the scope of the attack, by suggesting that it was a sexual encounter that got out of hand.
After this sentence pronounced by the federal courts, David DePape must now be tried by the Californian courts.