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Pamela Hemphill was bored. She’d retired as a drugs and alcohol counsellor and was looking for something to do. She started videotaping things and set up a YouTube channel. Armed with her camera, she’d take part in local events, protests, community days and a violent insurrection from within the Capitol Building in Washington.
“The MAGA Girls were flying flags for Trump,” she tells me from her living room in Idaho, “and they represented the women for Trump. They said, could you come videotape us and interview us? And I said, sure”
Pamela quickly became a key member of the MAGA circuit in her home state. She embraced, and videotaped, notorious far-right activists, taking part herself in intimidating demonstrations.
“I didn’t recognize the gaslighting going on, but they would tell you: ‘don’t listen to anything the Democrats are saying about Trump because they lie about everything.’ I just fell for it because… why would you ever suspect that Trump would be a cult leader and lie to everybody? It just doesn’t come to you that way… he’s for us.”
Pamela believed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. She believed it so much that on January 6th 2021, she joined thousands of others at a rally in Washington in an attempt to take it back.
“It was overwhelming. I was used to Boise [in Idaho]. I wasn’t prepared for that many people. You feel like you’re part of a family. That’s what cults do. That’s what they do to keep you engaged. [They make you feel] welcome and they’re happy that you’re videotaping for them and sharing their message. But you’re all of the same mind, that Trump is trying to save this nation, there’s a deep state coming after us.”
As his speech was wrapping up, somebody told Pamela that Donald Trump was marching up to the Capitol building, and so she decided to set off ahead of him, marshalled by the neo-fascist militant group Proud Boys, so she could capture it on tape. She arrived at the foot of the building, a towering stone beacon of democracy, guarded by a mesh of barricades and riot police. A pastor, William Dunphy, had been speaking to the crowd through a megaphone: ‘we patriots ought to be in that building,’ he said, ‘that building belongs to ‘We The People.’
“William Dunphy told me that he was talking to an officer and that they were negotiating. They were going to move the barriers and let us up on the steps. Well, that wasn’t true.”
The crowd lurched. The barricades broke. The police were attacked. Windows were smashed. Doors were broken. The hoards of protesters pushed their way through and over the threshold of the Capitol building, and, one by one, became insurrectionists.
‘Come on in,’ said Pamela to the crowd. ‘It’s your house.’
Pamela got swept up by the mob. “It was like a buffalo coming at you, all this crowd and these crazy people. They pushed me down and they stepped on my head, pulled out my shoulder, broke my glasses, cut my knee. I wasn’t breathing. I could have been killed.”
She could have left, too, but she didn’t. “I was frightened, but because I’ve been doing nothing but videotaping for the last two years, I wanted to stay and videotape. It doesn’t come to you that you’re trespassing… you look back and you wish you had left. But I didn’t. That’s why I’m not a victim.”
As the night set in, Pamela realised people from the crowd were being arrested. She panicked, and called a friend in the Idaho police, who checked a register and couldn’t find her name. She got on a plane and travelled home, the fear of the knock on the door lingering over her. Eventually, it came.
“People need to know the FBI treated me very well. They said that the FBI took this Grandma and dragged her down the stairs. That’s not true. They were really good to me.”
She was convicted for her role in the insurrection and served two months in prison. It was a relief, she says, after all the worry. Prison was “horrifying”, but there was one saving grace. She became friends with a woman called Michelle West.
In 1994, Michelle was sent to federal prison for two life sentences, and an additional 50 years, after being convicted of a nonviolent drug offence. Campaigners have been calling for her release for decades, claiming her harsh sentence is an example of a justice system that treats Black people with disproportionate severity.
“She saved my life in prison,” says Pamela. “You know, Muslims wear a scarf, she had no other scarf, but she took it off because I’d had cancer, I had no hair, and she said, “you’re leaving here in dignity”, and gave me her scarf. I owe that lady so much.”
Michelle tried to persuade Pamela to leave the MAGA movement. “She didn’t like Trump. She just said: “promise me that when you get out, you’ll do the right thing, because you know that Trump is a dangerous man.”
But it wasn’t Michelle’s influence that changed Pamela’s mind. In the months after leaving prison, she heard a story about Ryan Samsel. Samsel is widely credited as the first to have breached the Capitol building that day, the spark that lit the fire. He was claiming to have been beaten up in prison, and that he’d lost an eye in the attack. Pamela says donations to his cause increased by $40,000, and she became curious. “I contacted his girlfriend and his lawyer and they said, no, he had not lost his whole eye. So that did it.”
What really happened to Ryan Samsel, and the condition of his eye, is unclear, but for Pamela it was doubt. A crack had emerged in her belief system. “What else are they lying about?”
When Donald Trump shared her story on his platform Truth Social, comparing her two months in prison with the lack of jail time he felt Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son and a bogeyman of the MAGA movement, deserved for gun and tax convictions, Pamela hit back. She told him to stop using her story, that she had been “brainwashed” by his “cult”, and that she was rejecting him. The blowback was intense.
“The Idaho Liberty Dogs are here, and I knew them personally. They’re far right extremists. They’re the ones that open carry with [assault rifles] in this town… they hate me… they’d like to get me. I have to be careful here now.”
On January 20th, Joe Biden’s last day in office, Pamela’s friend, Michelle West, received clemency from the out-going President. She is expected to be released from prison this week. Later that day, the smell of Biden’s aftershave still hanging in the air, Donald Trump sat at his new desk in the Oval Office and signed an executive order to pardon the Jan 6th insurrectionists. Amongst them are some of the most notorious violent criminals and militant leaders in America – and Pamela Hemphill.
“I’m disgusted. This is his message… that the DOJ [Department of Justice] has been weaponised against him, ‘they’re coming after me, but they’re really coming after you.’ If he hadn’t pardoned them, the message would be that the DOJ is not totally weaponised against his followers, right? So, he couldn’t do that. This is about Trump. It’s not about the J6 defendants. He couldn’t care less about them.”
Pamela claims she is working with a lawyer to reject Donald Trump’s pardon.
“It’s just going to contribute to their narrative. ‘Pam’s taken the pardon. She knows she didn’t do anything wrong that day. She won’t admit it.’ That’s what they’re going to say. No, I did something wrong that day. I broke the law. I know I broke the law that day. Why would I want a pardon? For what?”
People say something else, too – that Pamela is playing down her story, and playing up the redemption arc. Since speaking to her, I have been tagged in long blog posts that claim she was a more notorious and knowing member of the far-right than she makes out.
That may be true, but talking to her, looking into her eyes as she tells me her story, I don’t feel any less convinced that she was lost. Like Ryan Samsel was lost, and pastor William Dunphy was lost, and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was lost. Their stories are littered with wrong-turns, rejections, loneliness, job losses, bitter divorces and painful grievances. The MAGA movement waits with open arms, a new family ready to embrace those cut adrift, and gives them something to build their lives around.
“It helps make you feel like you’re contributing for the good,” Pamela says about her work videotaping the MAGA activists. “[Before retiring] I would work 50 hours a week. I was invested in helping addicts and alcoholics. And that empty space… what do you do with it? So, I found something.”
Listen to my Times Radio interview with Pamela Hemphill in full by clicking here.