During the courtroom 911 call, Paul Pelosi appeared relatively calm as he spoke with a dispatcher in San Francisco. The dispatcher recognized the distress of the speaker’s husband and was praised by local authorities for the call’s need for immediate police action.
When the dispatcher asks Pelosi if he needs police, fire or medical attention, he replies: I don’t think so,” he then asked if the Capitol Police were available.
“They’re mostly home and protecting my wife,” Pelosi says.
In the recording, Pelosi can be heard telling DePappe, “What do you think?”
“Well, he thinks everything is fine,” Pelosi tells the dispatcher. “I have my problems, but he thinks everything is fine.”
The dispatcher then asks Pelosi if she knows who De Pappe is, but Pelosi says she doesn’t before adding that the man “told me not to do anything.” The dispatcher then gets Pelosi’s name and his home address. Pelosi then says, “He’s telling me to put my phone down and just do what he says.”
“What is the gentleman’s name?” asks the dispatcher.
“My name is David,” Depaup replies.
“And who is David,” the dispatcher asks.
“I don’t know,” Pelosi says. Depapu is then heard to say, “I am their friend.”
Depp, who wore orange pants and an orange crewneck sweatshirt throughout the hearing, sat with his attorney, public defender Adam Lipson, as he heard testimony. . When he identified DePappe as the man he said he saw Officer Cagney lunge at Pelosi with a hammer and hit him in the head, DePappe blinked and nodded and leaned back in his chair.
In body-worn camera footage, which was invisible to most members of the media and the public in court, Cagney and his partner can be heard walking to Pelosis’ home in Pacific Heights and knocking on the door. About ten seconds later, Paul Pelosi opens the door.
“Hello, how are you?” someone says.
“What’s going on, man,” says Cagney’s partner, Officer Colby Wilms. After a while, Wilms said, “Drop the hammer.” “Um, no,” Depapu replies.
Cagney testified that it was at that moment that Depapu began to lean back to try and pull Hammer away from Pelosi. Officers said Pelosi tried to back away from DePappe, but DePappe lunged at Pelosi and hit him in the head.
Cagney said he then “ran quickly” through the house. [he] I made it,” said DePape. Meanwhile, Pelosi was lying face down on the floor next to a puddle of blood, appearing unconscious. In the body camera footage, Pelosi can be heard snoring loudly while officers restrain Depapu.
At the time of the attack, DePape was living in a garage in Richmond, a city about 20 miles northeast of San Francisco. He was previously associated with a Bay Area nudity activist group and had his picture taken at a demonstration in the early 2010s. But in recent years, he’s shared his media posts on social in support of debunking conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccine, the 2020 presidential election, and the murder of George Floyd. His two blogs, written by a man named David DePape, were also filled with racist, anti-Semitic, and other bigoted statements.
According to the recording, DePape said in an interview with Harley that he was going to take Nancy Pelosi hostage and break her kneecap if she lied. But she said she didn’t think she would.
“He wanted to show that if she, Nancy Pelosi, attended Congress in a wheelchair, there would be consequences for their actions,” Hurley testified.
DePape also told Hurley that Paul Pelosi is not his target.
But after Pelosi called the police, DePappe said she felt like the chairman’s husband didn’t give him a choice.
“He’s pushing me into a corner where I have to do something,” he told Harley.
Depapu explained to Pelosi that he had “other targets” and that he could not be stopped.
“If I have to go through him, I will,” Depapu said in an interview.
Later in the interview, Hurley asked, “Why did you hit him?”
“I told him I wasn’t going to surrender,” Depapu said. “I am here to fight.
