Actual truth has erupted on Truth Social.
It came on Monday, after Donald Trump posted a compound falsehood.
“AMERICAN JUSTICE: 69-year-old Grandma with Cancer given more prison time for walking inside US Capitol than Hunter Biden for sharing classified documents with foreign regimes and multi-million dollar bribery schemes.”
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Trump endorsed the lies with a one word comment.
“HORRIBLE.”
But then that same grandma with cancer, who is actually 70, came right at him.
“Please @realDonaldTrump don’t be using me for anything, I’m not a victim of Jan 6, I pleaded guilty because I was guilty! #StopTheSpin,” Pamela Hemphill of Idaho wrote on the platform.
She added that Trump should not compare her to the current president’s son.
“He didn’t try to attack the Capitol!” she tweeted.
Hemphill says that until three months ago she was under the spell of what she calls “the Trump cult.” She attended the Jan. 6 rally as a self-appointed “citizen journalist” and videographer after her brother gave her a plane ticket to Washington. He was trying to lift her spirits as she fought breast cancer.
“My brother calls, says, ‘Hey, you, since you’re going to start chemotherapy, why don’t you go see Trump and video-record that?’” she told The Daily Beast. “I said I couldn’t afford it. But he said, ‘I’ll give it to you for a Christmas present.’”
Three days after Christmas, Hemphill announced on Facebook that she was going to Washington.
“It’s not going to be a FUN Trump rally that is planned for January 6th, it’s a WAR!”
She added, “The fight for America is REAL, show up. I don’t need to hear your excuses!” We have no second chances. If Millions, and I mean Millions show up, we may have a chance. FIND A WAY!”
That New Year’s Eve, a friend posted on Facebook what Hemphill says was just a joke photo of her holding a plastic rifle.
“Happy New Year! On my way to Washington on January 6,” the caption read.
Hemphill later said that she had not realized how lost she had become.
“You don’t see it as a cult when you’re in it,” she told The Daily Beast. “You don’t recognize it.”
She says she still had 40 stitches from her breast surgery when she was caught up in the rush into the Capitol building. She credits one of the cops with saving her from serious injury. A combination of excitement and pain medication caused her to then urge the crowd to go on in, she says
“This is your house. Your house!” she can be heard saying on her own video.
That next morning, she flew back to Boise. She was home eight months later when FBI agents arrived at her door and arrested her. They were nothing like the jackbooted feds of far-right fictions.
“The FBI were really good to me,” she recalled. “They just have procedures. It’s just what they do.”
The agents agreed to let her just sit down and collect herself.
“I said, ‘I gotta vape for a minute here. I’m nervous. I’ve never been in jail in my life,’” she recalled.
After Hemphill pleaded guilty to invading the Capitol, she was sentenced to 60 days in prison. In mid-July of last year, she paid two months rent in advance and surrendered at the federal prison in Dublin, California. She says that a large number of her fellow inmates were “cartel women.” They had not forgotten Trump’s diatribes against Mexican immigrants and they knew what being a Jan. 6 prisoner meant.
“They hate Trump,” she said. “I was lucky to get out.”
Hemphill says the 60 days felt like an eternity, and during the long hours she started to understand why the “cartel women” felt the way they did about Trump. She said she had deepening doubts that the election had really been stolen.
“I was starting to see things,” she recalled. “I was back and forth, not knowing what to believe.”
But Trumpism kept its hold on her until after she was back home and family members began speaking hard truth to her just as she had to alcoholics and drug abusers before she retired as a substance abuse counselor.
“Telling me, ‘Pam, you’re in a cult. You really need to get out of that… We really care about you, but this is a cult. You’re trapped in a cult,’” she recalled.
She began to see the Trump who had been there all along.
“I started seeing the narcissistic behavior,” she recalled. “And I said, ‘Wait, wait, this is gaslighting. This is not true.’” She began to listen to what her gut had been telling her.
“I never liked how he talked to people anyway,” she recalled. “He’s rude. He’s very mean to people.”
She discerned the truth about “fake news.”
“Tell everybody it’s fake news and they don’t listen to that news,” she said.
She became angry when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and others spoke of her as a victim.
“What’s happened is they're using me like a victim,” Hemphill said. “I’m not a victim. I pleaded guilty because I was guilty, period. I mean, I was trespassing. I had a choice—I could have left.”
And she was disturbed by the ongoing Trump mania.
“All those flags with his picture on it and T-shirts,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Wait, you guys, this is getting a little weird.’”
In the meantime, other Jan. 6 participants and their supporters were bombarding Hemphill with texts and tweets.
“Just telling me all their victimness, gaslighting,” she recalled. “And I started saying, ‘Wait, wait, wait. You guys, the officers were nice to me. I don’t see what you’re talking about.’ I started hearing all their lies, their stories. I said, ‘Wait, it doesn’t look like [the police] started anything.’”
In April, Hemphill finally broke the spell. She told herself what her family had been telling her.
“I said, ‘This is it. Pam, this is a cult. Just face it. Back away a hundred percent,’” she recalled.
Those still deep in the cult were furious.
“I started debunking them and they got mad at me and they started getting more mad at me and started a smear campaign on me,” Hemphill recalled. “That I was a fed agent. That I was antifa. Just silly children, high school stuff.”
She was exiled from the Jan. 6 Twitter spaces. She started one of her own that filled with people who wielded the best weapon against a cult.
“Facts,” she said.
She came to understand how she and others became members of the Trump cult.
“It’s called love-bombing,” she said. “He’s a rescuer trying to save the world, you know.”
On Monday, Hemphill responded to Trump with fact on Truth Social. And it was not because she favors any of the other presidential candidates.
“Too bad we don’t have a Black woman running,” she said.
