It appears Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion zealot and America’s most famous former Planned Parenthood employee, was on the Capitol steps during last week’s storming of the Hill. In a series of edited and then deleted Facebook posts as well as a handful of still-available tweets from January 6, the motivational speaker and birth control skeptic conveys the whole spectrum of human emotion during an attempted coup, from “grinning with the president” to “antifa almost pushed me down the Capitol steps” and “I have pepper spray in my lungs.”
Johnson is perhaps best known as the author of the disputed memoir that would become Unplanned, a movie about a woman who is forced to kill babies at an ever-increasing clip to satisfy abortion providers’ desire to become filthy rich. Since the success of her media endeavors, she has launched a podcast, a conference, and an organization that encourages abortion providers and Planned Parenthood employees to quit their jobs. On January 6, she apparently attended the president’s rally, where she took a grinning selfie and lauded “the most prolife president in our country.” From there things get somewhat hazier, though a few Twitter users have made a fairly convincing case that news footage from near the Capitol steps shows Johnson milling around in the crowd.
After the group broke into the Capitol, Johnson posted two missives on Facebook, one of which has been taken down but is still available via Google cache. In the still-public post, Johnson writes that she is in D.C. and was “with the president earlier” but is safe despite having “got a little bit of pepper spray in my lungs,” noting she was “only mildly in the fray” earlier.
The deleted post tells a somewhat more intimate—and widely debunked—story in which antifa agitators dressed up as Trump supporters to storm the Capitol, fight the elderly, and nearly push Johnson off the Capitol steps:
I’m safe and sound back in my hotel. Let me just speak to a few things about today.
First, from my observation, over 99% of the hundreds of thousands of people in attendance today at the Capitol were true patriots who came to support this country, our president and election integrity. They were peaceful, law abiding citizens. They were not there to vandalize anything or to cause a disturbance.
We now know that some of the people who led the group that “stormed the Capitol” were actually with Antifa. There are multiple pictures of these same people at BLM protests and on Antifa websites. It’s unfortunate that the media has portrayed a peaceful event as something that it wasn’t…but that’s honestly not surprising. I’m not saying that there weren’t crazies at this event. Of course there were. Just like there are crazy anti-abortionists who bomb clinics. Just like there are women who use abortion as birth control and have 15 abortions. There is “fringe” in every movement. And fringe is usually birthed out of frustration. Some of us turn our frustration into something constructive…and some people resort to unproductive behaviors.
Let me be clear with all of you. I KNOW Antifa was there because I was almost knocked down the stairs of the Capitol when a fight broke out between some Trump supporters and some Antifa activists. It was discovered that some of the people in the crowd were actually with Antifa, but were posing as Trump supporters. One of them had gotten physically violent with an elderly woman and had knocked her down the steps. A fight broke out and those men were physically removed by a group of Trump supporters. I saw it with my own eyes. I know they were there. And I know these Antifa activists were inside the Capitol because it was clear they had been gassed. (Their faces were puffy and red). Were there some fringe Trumpers who got pulled into the mix out of sheer frustration? Absolutely. But that was not 99% of the crowd. And that is not who we are.
We are not the party that vandalizes and burns down buildings and hurts people. We are about law and order. That is EXACTLY why we are here…because we believe in following the law. We believe in democracy.
Please pray for our nation.
Jezebel wishes Johnson a speedy recovery from both the pepper spray and the cognitive dissonance. Currently, the activist’s position appears to be that “crazy people who bust into the Capitol do not represent conservatives”—and also, apparently, that Twitter’s purge of toxic accounts is a false flag operation to distract from “election integrity.”