The man police say broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and viciously attacked her husband is linked by name to two far-out conspiracy blogs.
David DePape, 42, of Berkeley, Calif. was identified Friday afternoon as the suspect in the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, 82, in the early hours of Friday morning.
DePape’s name is tied to two conspiracy blogs. One, titled “Big Brother Censorship Hell,” features a banner warning readers that “The elites/ruling class never censor themselves. You can still turn on any mainstream news channel to hear day and night the narrative put forth by the people who rule you.”
Although the posts written under the username “daviddepape” are mostly blank, they feature bizarre headlines including “Pedophile normalization” and “Communist Voodoo science.”
The first post on the site was created in June 2007, though it was most recently updated in August 2022.
The second blog, frenlyfrens.com, hosts more detailed posts under categories like “Climate hysteria” and “Corruption.” Several of the posts espouse anti-Semitic conspiracies, including one that reads “Isn’t their [sic] a trope about Jews ABUSING the courts to rip people off.”
While it is unclear if DePape — who has been described as living in storage units — himself authored these blogs, relatives and acquaintances confirmed to CNN that he frequently shared conspiracies on Facebook and seemed “out of touch with reality.”
DePape’s Facebook page, which has since been removed, featured dozens of posts riddled with false information about the COVID pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Jan. 6, 2021 riot on the Capitol.
In addition to a number of transphobic posts, DePape also disseminated website links falsely claiming that COVID vaccines were deadly.
“The death rates being promoted are what ever (sic)‘THEY’ want to be promoted as the death rate,” one post allegedly read.
Laura Hayes, who worked with DePape several years ago in Berkeley, told CNN that his social media activity with “so phobic in so many ways” and filled with “so much anger.”
Another former acquaintance, Linda Schneider, told the outlet that she received “really disturbing” emails from DePape, and she eventually stopped communicating with him “because it seemed so dangerous.”
Originally from Canada, DePape first made headlines in 2013 when he was featured in an SF Gate story about activist Gypsy Taud’s nudist wedding.
Described as a “hemp jewelry maker and father figure,” Depape was the best man at the ceremony.
San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott named DePape as a suspect, saying officers responded to the Pelosi household in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco at 2:27 a.m., where officers said they saw a man attacking Pelosi.
Both men were transferred to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital following the incident.
Pelosi underwent surgery on his skull Friday and is expected to make a full recovery, according to a statement put out by his wife.
Nancy Pelosi, also 82, was in Washington with her security detail when the attack occurred.
