She said she “will not stay up late at night” waiting for an apology “from a man who has no remorse over using abusive language towards women.”
“I was minding my own business, walking up the steps, and Representative Yoho put his finger in my face,” Ocasio-Cortez recounted. “He called me disgusting, he called me crazy, he called me out of my mind, and he called me dangerous.”
“I want to be clear that representative Yoho’s comments were not deeply hurtful or piercing to me,” she claimed. “Because I have worked a working-class job. I have waited tables and I have ridden the subway. I have walked the streets in New York City. And this kind of language is not new. I have encountered words uttered by Mr. Yoho and men uttering the same words as Mr. Yoho while I was being harassed in restaurants. I have tossed men out of bars that have used language like Mr. Yoho’s.”
“I am someone’s daughter too,” the Congresswoman said. “My father, thankfully, is the not alive to see how Mr. Yoho treated his daughter. My mother got to see Mr. Yoho’s disrespect on the floor of this house towards me on television, and I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men. Now, what I am here to say is the that this harm that Mr. Yoho levied, it tried to levy against me, was not just an incident directed at me, but when you do that to any woman, what Mr. Yoho did was give permission to other men to do that to his daughters.”
“I could not allow my nieces, I could not allow the little girls I go home to, I could not allow victims of verbal abuse and worse to see that, to see that excuse and to see our Congress accept it as legitimate and accept it as an apology,” she said.
