Pennsylvania Lt. Governor’s Wife Called Racial Slur at Grocery Store

Gisele Barreto Fetterman, wife of Pennsylvania’s Lt. Governor John Fetterman, was called a racial slur while making a quick grocery store run on Sunday. 

In pursuit of some golden kiwis, Gisele went to a store close to their Braddock home. While there, however, she was confronted by a woman who was aware of who she is, and who she’s married to. “She said, ‘There’s that n-word that Fetterman married. You don’t belong here. No one wants you here. You don’t belong here,'” she told The Washington Post. “The fact that she was so comfortable and bold to just do it to my face with an audience … that was really scary.” 

Fetterman expressed those same concerns on Twitter yesterday when she shared her account of the incident, along with a brief video showing the person who followed her into the parking lot to call her the N-word again while she was inside her car. 

Gisele was a child when her mother brought her from Brazil to the United States. She was an undocumented immigrant at the time, but has since become a U.S. citizen. “It was a really long time of really living in the shadows and being really scared of every knock at the door,” she said of being undocumented. “To then being at a place where I’m so grateful that I can vote and that I get called for jury duty and I can finally belong to this country that I love so much — to then having these moments where I completely feel unwelcome all over again and scared.”