Gisele Fetterman talks life as an advocate, immigrant and wife of politician
SLIPPERY ROCK, Pa. (KDKA) — Slippery Rock University hosted Gisele Fetterman on Wednesday for a conversation about her life as an advocate, immigrant and the wife of a politician.
It came just days after her husband, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, left Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, D.C. where he was receiving treatment for clinical depression since mid-February.
Gisele Fetterman took the stage at Miller Auditorium, ready to talk to students, faculty and the greater community, sharing what she's lived and learned, coming to the U.S. as a "dreamer" undocumented from Brazil.
"My mom would say, 'I love you, have a great day, be invisible,'" Gisele Fetterman said to the crowd. "So that's something I heard every single day because there was a price to pay."
She also discussed how she launched multiple nonprofits to help those with needs like food insecurity.
"My work has always been based on pain. I always say that you have to find that thing that keeps you up at night, and you have to work on that and work to ease the suffering for the next person," Gisele Fetterman said at the event.
One role she continues to adjust to is that as the wife of John Fetterman, who went from Braddock's mayor to Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor and now a senator.
"There's a whole other world where I receive physical threats and verbal threats. I've always received more hate mail than my husband, and he was the elected official," she said to the crowd.
Gisele Fetterman described how she's learned to navigate the hate and criticism, most recently following her husband's in-patient stay at the hospital. Five days ago, doctors released the senator, saying he's in remission.
"Life comes that way. I don't think I was ever prepared for life to be easy. I think life has always been a little hard," she said.
The senator is now back home in Braddock spending time with family after publicly addressing his struggles.
"I think the message is that you don't have to suffer, that there is help and help works. And that it is really courageous and really brave to seek help," she told KDKA-TV.
Despite this, Gisele Fetterman said she still faces backlash as a woman.
"It is our job to just get stronger, to deal with it, and I think that's an issue. We have to wholesale reject those ideas, or else we just continue to put blame on the woman, right? It's 'my fault' genre. It's my fault he had a stroke," Gisele Fetterman said.
She said she will never be defined by her husband and urged those at the event to be themselves and not follow society's expectations.
