Pelosi home invasion suspect had posted on QAnon

The man accused of breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s California home and severely beating her husband with a hammer appears to have made racist and often rambling posts online, including some that questioned the results of the 2020 election, defended former President Donald Trump and echoed QAnon. conspiracy theories.

David DePape, 42, grew up in Powell River, British Columbia, before leaving about 20 years ago to follow an older girlfriend to San Francisco. A street address listed on DePape in the Bay Area college town of Berkeley led to a PO box at a UPS store.

DePape was arrested at Pelosi’s home early Friday. San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said she expected to file multiple felony charges, including attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, robbery and elder abuse.

Stepfather Gene DePape said the suspect had lived with him in Canada until he was 14 and had been a quiet boy.

“David was never violent that I saw and he was never in any trouble, even though he was very lonely and played too many video games,” Gene DePape said.

She said she hasn’t seen her stepson since 2003 and has tried to contact him several times over the years without success.

“In 2007 I tried to get in touch, but his girlfriend hung up on me when I asked to talk,” Gene DePape said.

David DePape was known in Berkeley as a pro-nudity activist who had picketed naked at protests against local ordinances requiring people to be clothed in public.

Gene DePape said the girlfriend his son followed to California was named Gypsy and they had two children together. DePape also has a son with a different woman, his stepfather said.

Photographs published by The San Francisco Chronicle on Friday identified DePape playing naked outside City Hall with dozens of other people at the 2013 wedding of pro-nudity activist Gypsy Taub, who was marrying another man. Taub did not respond to calls or emails Friday.

A 2013 article in The Chronicle described David DePape as a “hemp jewelry maker” who lived in a Victorian apartment in Berkeley with Taub, who hosted a talk show on local public access television called “Uncensored 9 /11”, in which it appeared. naked and pushing conspiracy theories that the 2001 terrorist attacks were “an inside job.”

A pair of weblogs published in recent months online under the name David DePape contained diatribes about technology, aliens, communists, religious minorities, transsexuals and global elites.

An Aug. 24 entry titled “Q” featured an eschatological collection of memes that included photos of dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and referenced QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that advocates the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and baby-eating cannibals.

“Big Brother has deemed doing your own research a mind crime,” read one post that appeared to combine references to QAnon with George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”

In an Aug. 25 post titled “Gun Rights,” the poster wrote: “You no longer have rights. Your basic human rights hinder big brothers ability to enslave and control you in a complete way and totalizing”.

Web hosting service WordPress removed one of the sites Friday afternoon for violating its terms of service.

In a different placesomeone posting under the name DePape repeated false claims about COVID vaccines and wearing masks, questioned whether climate change is real, and showed an illustration of a zombified Hillary Clinton dining on meat human

There appeared to be no direct posts about Pelosi, but there were posts defending former President Donald Trump and Ye, the rapper officially known as Kayne West who recently made anti-Semitic comments.

In other posts, the writer said Jews helped finance Hitler’s political rise in Germany and suggested there was an anti-Semitic plot in Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.

“The more Ukrainians die needlessly, the cheaper the land will be to buy from the Jews,” the post said.

In a Sept. 27 post, the writer said that any reporter who denied Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election “should be dragged right out into the street and shot.”

___

AP Global Investigative Reporter Michael Biesecker reported from Washington and Breaking News Investigative Reporter Bernard Condon from New York. Reporters Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles, Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco and news researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed.

admin