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Michael Short

The San Francisco Bay area man arrested in the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband filled a blog a week before the incident with delusional thoughts, including that an invisible fairy attacked an acquaintance and sometimes appeared to him in the form of a bird, according to online writings under his name.

David DePape, 42, also published hundreds of blog posts in recent months sharing memes in support of fringe commentators and far-right personalities. Many of the posts were filled with screeds against Jews, Black people, Democrats, the media and transgender people.

During October, DePape published over 100 posts. While each loads, a reader briefly glimpses an image of a person wearing a giant inflatable unicorn costume, superimposed against a night sky. The photos and videos that followed were often dark and disturbing.

He published a drawing of the Devil kneeling and asking a caricature of a Jewish person to teach him the arts of “lying, deception, cheating and incitement.” Several contain lifelike images of rotting human flesh and blood, including a zombified Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton. Others depict headless bodies against bleak, dystopian landscapes.

Before those writings were removed Saturday, The Washington Post reviewed them, as well as gory photos, illustrations and videos on a website that DePape registered under his name in early August and that his daughter confirmed was his. Notably, the voluminous writings do not mention Pelosi. Police say DePape broke into the home Pelosi shares with her husband early Friday, yelled “Where is Nancy?” and attacked 82-year-old Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

Pelosi remained hospitalized Saturday, recovering from surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hand, according to the speaker’s office. San Francisco’s police chief and district attorney provided no update, but on Friday local, state and federal authorities said they were working together to investigate DePape’s motive.

A woman who identified DePape as her “father” said Friday that she was stunned by his arrest even though he was, she said, abusive to other members of the family. “I love my father,” Inti Gonzalez wrote in a statement posted to her website and later removed. “He did genuinely try to be a good person but the monster in him was always too strong for him to be safe to be around.”

“This attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband came as a shock to me,” wrote Gonzalez, who is 21, according to her website. “I didn’t see this coming and there was no sign of the possibility from his end.” Gonzalez wrote she followed her father’s writing online but was not aware of the website he registered in August.

Reached by The Post before she issued the statement, Gonzalez declined to comment about DePape.

DePape grew up in British Columbia, a relative told CNN. He briefly drew public attention nearly a decade ago in San Francisco when he participated in a demonstration against a city ordinance banning public nudity. The protest was led by Gonzalez’s mother, Gypsy Taub, an outspoken nudity activist.

Videos posted on YouTube show that DePape was among a group of protesters marching through San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood for the 2013 demonstration.

On his blog, DePape wrote bitterly in recent months of his relationship with Taub, who also promoted debunked conspiracy theories on her own blog, including that 9/11 was an “inside job.” He accused Taub of manipulating her children to turn them against him.

Taub is <a href="https://www.alcoda.org/newsroom/2021/aug/people_v_oxane_taub#more">serving a sentence</a> for felony stalking and attempted child abduction, after prosecutors said she became fixated with a 14-year-old boy and attempted to kidnap him. She could not be reached for comment. Gonzalez told The Post that she had spoken with Taub and that Taub would be making a statement upon her release. She is eligible for parole in January.

Four days before the Pelosi attack, DePape posted on his website what he presented as a 2021 email to Gonzalez. In it, he told her he struggled with the urge to end his life as his relationship with Taub and her children was falling apart. “I was extremely suicidal, Mentally I would beg you guys daily to let me kill myself,” he wrote in the email. DePape cut off contact with Taub and her children after he was he was kicked out of their home and living in a car, according to his online account. He does not say when those events occurred.

The domain <a href="http://frenlyfrens.com/" target=_blank>frenlyfrens.com</a> was registered Aug. 8 under DePape’s name and to an address in Richmond, Calif., where a neighbor told a Post reporter he lived. The web address uses the phonetic spelling of “friend,” which has become a slang term adopted by many in the far right — a term that is sometimes written as an acronym for Far Right Ethno-Nationalist.

Reddit <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/after-9-months-reddit-finally-bans-group-spreading-thinly-veiled-anti-semitism/">banned</a> an openly anti-semitic group by the name <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/FrenWorld/">/r/FrenWorld</a> in 2019, saying it contained postings that glorified or encouraged violence. One cartoon featured repeatedly by members contained pictures of a frog character that has been appropriated by the far right. “Frens, sound the alarms!” one says. “Arm yourselves! The longnose is coming, the longnose is coming.”

Two weeks after registering the site, DePape’s first post was titled “Mary Poppins.” Amid the ongoing feud between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Disney over the company’s criticism of the state’s law known by critics as the “don’t say gay” bill, the violent video depicted a SWAT team firing at Poppins.

Details of DePape’s everyday life in recent months are included in the postings that followed. He played video games at a nearby library and spent hours meditating, according to the writings. In another post, he shared an image of a fantasy miniature salamander he purchased on Etsy. He wrote that he was looking to purchase a fairy house on Etsy but was frustrated that the doors were painted and so could not be used by a fairy. “They have lots of fairy houses but NONE of them are MADE for fairies,” he wrote.

In late August, DePape became engrossed in the decision by Twitter to ban Jordan Peterson for his posts about transgender people. The Canadian psychologist turned conservative podcaster had once said that being transgender was comparable to “satanic ritual abuse.”

DePape published six posts in support of Peterson and then continued with his own caustic takes on transgender people, saying they should not be a protected group. “They were not BORN a freak. They are not INHERENTLY a freak threw no fault of their own. … They are CHOOSING to be FREAKS,” he wrote in one post.

In the last week of September, as the Justice Department filed a motion seeking to compel former Trump adviser Peter Navarro to return government emails, DePape blogged his take: “No evidence of election fraud. Any journalist saying that should be dragged straight out into the street and shot.”

DePape was also active on the message board 4chan, a site notorious for extremist discussion, posting memes and debating other anonymous users about his beliefs, according to his website. In an Oct. 24 post titled “Disinfo Shill Tactics,” he complained that he was a target of law enforcement he described as ‘paid shills’ trying to manipulate the message board. “I would come in and lay out the facts and so all the paid shills would jump on me. To try and suppress it,” he wrote.

That same day, DePape shared images from a construction site where he worked months ago. One highlighted a jackhammer with the number 33 on it, an apparent reference to a conspiracy theory about Freemasons and world control. A co-worker remarked he sounded like the now deceased right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh after referring to feminists as “feminazis” during a discussion on feminism, according to the account.

In another post on Oct. 24, four days before the attack on Pelosi, DePape shared images of a wooden birdhouse he said he had purchased for an invisible fairy he communicated with that had begun interfering with his life. “He appears in a form that makes sense in my reality because I can’t see fairies. He’ll do things to let me know its him and he o[f]ten appears as a bird,” he wrote.

Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, 2018, for coverage of Alabama Senate race

Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, 2018, for coverage of Alabama Senate race

Finalist - Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News, 2014, for coverage of Navy Yard shooting

Finalist - Livingston Award for International Reporting, 2004, for coverage of outsourcing of high-tech jobs 

Georgetown University, B.A. in English

Aaron Davis is an investigative reporter who has covered local, state and federal government, as well as the aviation industry and law enforcement. Davis shared in winning the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2018.

Aaron Davis

2018 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for coverage of Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore

2021 Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia University Award

2020 Webby Award for Video Documentary

2020 WHNPA Multimedia Journalist of the Year

2020 Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence

2019 Edward R. Murrow Award for News Documentary 

2018 Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting 

2018 Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting 

2017 Webby Award for News & Politics: Individual Episode 

2017 Edward R. Murrow Award for investigative reporting 

The College of William and Mary, BA in Government

Dalton Bennett is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The Washington Post, where he has worked since 2016 after five years covering conflict with the AP.  