Did Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lie about being at the Capitol on January 6, 2021? No, that's not true: Ocasio-Cortez never said she was at the U.S. Capitol building when it was stormed by protesters on that date. Instead, she stated on Instagram Live that she was in her office at the nearby Cannon House Office Building at the time.
The claim appeared in a post and video (archived here) on X, formerly Twitter, on October 15, 2024, with the video showing the on-screen title "Being...AOC - CNN." The text caption above the video said:
AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] thought that she was going to be rap*d and killed at the Capitol on January 6th.
AOC was not at the Capitol on January 6th.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Oct 16 16:05:48 2024 UTC)
This post and video provided no evidence to support its assertions that Ocasio-Cortez lied about being at the Capitol during the violence on January 6.
The video
The 26-second clip was pulled from a longer interview on the CNN series "Being...," hosted by Dana Bash. Ocasio-Cortez appeared in the show's first episode, which aired on August 9, 2021. Here's a transcript of the exchange between Ocasio-Cortez and Bash:
Ocasio-Cortez: I didn't think that I was just going to be killed. I thought other things were going to happen to me as well.
Bash: So, what sounds like what you're telling me right now is that you didn't only think that you were going to die. You thought you were going to be raped.
Ocasio-Cortez: Yeah, yeah. I thought I was.
Bash: And that you now understand, having thought about it, is because of your experience.
Ocasio-Cortez: Yeah, yeah. I think so. I think so.
Ocasio-Cortez said, months earlier, on February 2, 2021, "I'm a survivor of sexual assault."
Lead Stories found a longer version of the clip (archived here) on CNN's Facebook page, published on August 9, 2021, under the title "Ocasio-Cortez reveals fears on the day of insurrection." The video is embedded below. The segment included in the social media post begins about 29 seconds into it:
The clip is also available on the CNN website (archived here).
Instagram Live video
Ocasio-Cortez talked about her January 6 experience in greater detail during a video on Instagram Live (archived here) on February 2, 2021, titled "What Happened at the Capitol." She also posted it to YouTube the same day.
At about the 35:35 mark in the YouTube video, she talks about how she left the Capitol late in the morning of January 6 to get her second COVID-19 vaccine before she headed to her congressional office. She said:
So, for you all to know, there's the Capitol Hill Complex, but members of Congress -- except for the speaker and other very, very high-ranking ones -- don't actually work in that building with the dome [U.S. Capitol]. There's buildings like right next to the dome, and that's where our actual offices are.
Her office is located across the street from the Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building. The address is listed on her official congressional website.
Google Maps shows the office for Ocasio-Cortez is less than half a mile from the Capitol, where rioters stormed the building (circles and arrow added by Lead Stories):
(Source: Google Maps screenshot taken on Wed Oct 16 18:49:38 2024 UTC)
About six minutes later (the 41:35 mark) in the video, Ocasio-Cortez talked about the panic that set in on January 6 as someone began beating on her office door around 1 p.m. It turned out to be a Capitol Police officer who didn't initially identify himself, but she didn't know that at the time:
When all of a sudden, I hear boom boom boom boom boom on my door, and then I hear these huge, violent bangs on my door, and then every door going into my office -- just ... bang bang bang bang, like someone was trying to break the door down. And ... there were ... no voices; there were no yells, no one saying who they were, nobody identifying themselves, and just boom boom boom.
Ocasio-Cortez went on to describe how she frantically tried to hide, first in the office bathroom and then in a closet before a staffer identified the person pounding on the door as a member of the Capitol Police who wanted to shuttle them to safety because an initial wave of protesters had just stormed the outer police barrier around the Capitol. In less than an hour, the protesters would be inside the Capitol building.
Conclusion
While Ocasio-Cortez did say that she was afraid she would be raped and killed, she never said she was at the U.S. Capitol when she had those fears. In her Instagram Live video, Ocasio-Cortez clearly states that she was in her congressional office across the street.
Read more
At the time this was written, the claim had previously been reviewed by multiple fact checking organizations, including AP News, Snopes, PolitiFact and Reuters, all in 2021.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims concerning Ocasio-Cortez can be found here.
