Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Says: “My past sexual assault was what led me to run for office”

While being interviewed by GQ Magazine, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opened up about a past sexual assault and acknowledged the incident propelled her to public service.

Ocasio-Cortez said, “My sexual assault was a pivotal event in the trajectory that led me to run for office. I can say that in retrospect, but obviously I didn’t know that at the time.”

The 32-year old representative for New York, first opened up about the assault in the wake of the insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 by taking to Instagram Live to share her story of past trauma.

“The reason I’m getting emotional in this moment is because the folks who tell us to move on, that it’s not a big deal, that we should forget what’s happened, or even telling us to apologize, these are the same tactics of abusers,” she said. “I’m a survivor of sexual assault, and I haven’t told many people that in my life. But when we go through trauma, trauma compounds on each other.”

Ocasio-Cortez also spoke out about how she couldn’t talk about Jan. 6 without disclosing the assault, because it was such a central part of her experience.

“I felt like I could not really adequately communicate what that experience was without giving people the context of what I had lived through and what was being echoed, because so much of it was about resonance and fear of a thing that was not theoretical but a fear of a thing that I had experienced,” she added.

Speaking during an interview last year with CNN’s dana Bash, she discussed the fear she experienced due to the rioters.

“I didn’t think that I was just going to be killed. I thought other things were going to happen to me as well,” she said.

Asked then if she feared she was going to be sexually assaulted, the New York lawmaker told Bash, “Yeah, yeah. I thought I was.”

Speaking to GQ, Ocasio-Cortez says that her prior experience with assault has also forced her to confront all of these things that she was taught about her self-worth as a woman.

“I didn’t grow up in an explicitly ideological household … I grew up in a very socially conservative and very deeply religious household with very prescriptive messages about women. And it’s not even sometimes that they’re just handed down from your parents, but just from the culture that you live in,” she concluded her interview.