Giselle Barreto Fetterman, the wife of Pennsylvania’s deputy governor, went to the grocery store on Sunday to pick up some golden kiwi.
It was a last-minute dash, so I headed to my local Aldi store without the state soldiers who would normally protect her. Three boxes of kiwis in hand, Mrs. Fetterman was standing in line to pay when a woman stopped and stared at her.
“Oh, there is that word that Fetterman married,” Ms. Fetterman remembered the woman saying to her, confirming in a telephone interview that the woman had used racial slander without being shortened. Mrs. Faitherman is a wife Lieutenant Governor John FettermanDemocrat.
Mrs. Faitherman, from Share an account for the meeting on Twitter Sunday night, she said she froze. The woman kept repeating “You don’t belong here” before moving away, she said.
Shaken, Mrs.Fetterman paid for her products and drove to her car. The woman has reappeared, taking off her purple mask and repeating the racial slander of Mrs. Fetterman, who recorded the meeting and shared it with her social media followers.
“I love, love, love this country, but we are deeply divided,” Fetterman wrote.
“This behavior and this hatred are taught,” she added. “If you know her, if she is your neighbor or relative, please, please teach her to love instead.”
There was talk of the meeting just three weeks before the presidential election in Pennsylvania Reenact its role as an important battle state. President Trump lags his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joseph Biden Jr., in nearly every poll, but Republicans have reduced the Democratic voter registration advantage by nearly 200,000 in a state Trump won in 2016 with less than 45,000 votes. .
Ms. Fetterman said in an interview that the Pennsylvania State Police had identified the woman in the video and was investigating.
Mrs. Fetterman, a native of Brazil, aged 38, is an undocumented former immigrant who came with her mother and brother to New York City before she was eight years old. She said she received a green card in 2004 and became a citizen in 2009.
She and Mr. Faitherman were married in 2008 and they have three children. They live in Braddock, Pennsylvania, an area east of Pittsburgh where Mister Fetterman was formerly mayor. She said the grocery store was about two minutes’ drive from her home.
She said she was the target of the hateful comments online and in emails, but this Sunday’s encounter was the first time she had been attacked in the face.
“I had a great deal of hate towards me,” she said. “I learned to get used to them and the right thing to say. It just became natural for me. My face was never in public. Nobody is immune to that.”
Her tweet, which has been viewed more than 300,000 times as of Monday afternoon, has elicited reactions from lawmakers on social media.
“We must teach our children kindness, acceptance, inclusiveness, and condemn hate when and where we see it,” Senator Bob Casey, Democrat from Pennsylvania, He wrote on Twitter. Another Democratic member of Pennsylvania, Representative Mary Jay Scanlon, He said on Twitter That “hatred has no place here.”
Ms. Fetterman said she hopes people will treat the woman she approached at the grocery store “with compassion and teach her differently.”
She said, “I know I wasn’t the first to receive this, but I hope to be the last with her in person.”
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