Roughly a week after Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) admitted himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to get treated for severe depression (his second trip to a hospital in two weeks), his wife Gisele posted a mini-thread on Twitter in which she explained that not long after the senator decided to get help that she and their kids hopped in the car and “ran away” on a trip to Canada and Buffalo:
Mrs. Fetterman was heavily criticized at the time for being insensitive and callous, leaving her husband behind in the hospital while she and the kids went ziplining and sightseeing up north.
The Washington Post was quick to step in and defend her, first in a now-deleted tweet from reporter Colby Itkowitz:
And then on Thursday, when Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse swooped in with the sexism card and—incredibly—equated Mrs. Fetterman and the criticisms she’s received over the last several months since her husband suffered a debilitating stroke to rape survivors who were blamed for their assaults:
I started my twice-a-decade rereading of “The Handmaid’s Tale” a few nights ago, and one scene that sticks out every time I pick up the book is when the miserable Janine is made to recount her sexual assault, then to assume responsibility for it. Her fault, her fault, Janine’s fellow trainees chant, surrounding her and pointing. This is the magic trick of Gilead’s worldview; this is the magic trick of a lot of conservative worldviews. Men are the ones in charge of what happens, but the women are the ones to blame.[…]The attacks on Gisele, in particular, are dizzying in scope and ambition: It was her fault that her husband ran for Senate. It was her fault that he won. It was her fault that her children were not dressed more formally for their father’s swearing-in. John Fetterman, according to one line of grotesque and specious Twitter speculation, struggled with depression because his wife wouldn’t stop seeking the spotlight. But then it was also Gisele’s fault when, to avoid the spotlight brought on by his hospitalization, she decided to take their children to Niagara Falls.
Because wrapping themselves in victimhood is one thing Democrats do very well, Fetterman embraced the columnist’s comparison of her “journey” from being Second Lady of Pennsylvania and then being the wife of a sitting U.S. Senator to women who have suffered through sexual assaults:
Though Gisele Fetterman set the tweet so that only people she follows or mentions could reply in the comments, she faced backlash from people who found her playing the victim and latching on to such a obscenely offensive comparison to be reprehensible:
On one hand, by media/Democrat standards the public was supposed to believe that Gisele Fetterman was the glue that held the Fetterman Senate campaign together after her husband suffered his stroke in May 2022. I mean she essentially took it over for several months to the point that one Rolling Stone reporter referred to Gisele Fetterman as the “de facto candidate” in an October 2022 tweet before deleting it:
As of this writing, the article the reporter wrote still contains that characterization (archived link):
Suddenly, the reluctant political spouse became the de facto candidate.
But now that John Fetterman is an actual senator and is even less accessible than he was during the course of most of his campaign, Gisele Fetterman and her enablers in the media want to make her off limits from criticism to the point they paint any of it as sexism while at the same time likening her supposed plight to that of rape victims?
That’s just disgusting, and it’s not right. If women want to be treated as equals to men in the public sphere then they should take their lumps in the court of public opinion just like men do and stop falling back on the woman card each and every time they get their feelings hurt.
Anything less sets women back decades, which unfortunately is exactly what Gisele Fetterman and the Washington Post did this week with their juvenile reactions to Mrs. Fetterman being called out for her both her words and her actions.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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