David DePape, the man suspected of using a hammer to assault Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in the Pelosis’ San Francisco home early on Friday morning, is still largely unknown.
According to law enforcement sources, a probe into DePape’s motivations is still ongoing. His purported online activities tend to paint a picture of a man obsessed with conspiracy theories and extreme viewpoints, which looked to be related to his YouTube viewing habits.
Gypsy Taub, a nudist activist who had briefly lived in Berkeley, has received some attention as media outlets try to learn more about the 42-year-old.
When officials were debating outlawing public nudity in San Francisco back in 2012, state senator Scott Wiener of California, who represents San Francisco, claimed to have seen Taub during the contentious discussion.
In spite of persistent protests, the municipal council narrowly (6 to 5) approved the ban that year. Even though Wiener presented that legislation and claims to have seen protests and people voicing their ideas, he claims that Taub, a prominent activist at the time, made him feel uneasy right away.
He told “I genuinely wanted to say I didn’t want to be anywhere near her. There was something really odd about her that frightened me.
The Sacramento Bee claimed in 2012 that Taub advocated 9/11 conspiracy theories on public access television while wearing nothing but a bathing suit.
DePape seemed familiar, but Wiener was unable to establish whether he was with her throughout the demonstrations. He declared that DePape was someone he also wanted to “stay clear” of if DePape was connected to Taub.
It was very, extremely creepy that [DePape] was a member of that group, added Wiener. And you wished to stay away from them.
Although the specific nature of Taub’s relationship with DePape is uncertain, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2013 that the two had been cohabitating in a Berkeley Victorian. (The San Francisco Chronicle and USATIMEPOST are both owned by Hearst, but they run separately.)
USATIMEPOST was unable to contact DePape’s other family members and friends. Taub did not respond to emails or phone calls.
CNN and other media sites have claimed that DePape published paranoid content on his Facebook page about things like the COVID-19 vaccination and the results of the 2020 presidential election. According to news reports, Facebook canceled DePape’s account on Friday. A request for comment from SFGATE went unanswered by a Facebook representative right away.
USATIMEPOST was unable to determine whether any posts on two different blogs, one housed on WordPress.com and the other on the subscriber-only hosting site Wix, were actually written by David DePape.
On both websites, the poster posted jokes about Disney movies, artificial intelligence art, and an admission that he became “into all this” as a result of Gamergate, a harassment campaign that targeted “social justice” and women in video games.
He also shared YouTube videos with comments that were homophobic, transphobic, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and antisemitic as well as jokes about Canadian commentator Jordan Peterson and “anti-woke” mathematician James Lindsay A day prior to the attack, the Wix website had an article titled “Why Colleges are Becoming Cults” that had just been published.
A WordPress representative told USATIMEPOST that the blog was taken down on Friday because it had broken the host’s terms of service. When questioned about how specifically the blog broke WordPress standards, they declined to comment on “the intricacies of individual sites” and gave no more information. The Wix website is still live, but a Tel Aviv-based spokesperson for the company declined SFGATE’s request for comment.
According to San Francisco Police Department Chief Bill Scott, DePape was detained at the San Francisco County jail and could be charged with a variety of crimes, including attempted homicide, elder abuse, burglary, and assault with a deadly weapon.