IDAHO, USA — This story originally appeared in the Idaho Press.
She sits on a street corner outside the state Capitol grounds, every Wednesday and Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m.
Wearing a T-shirt bearing the phrase “Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Body” — a now-notorious tongue-twister uttered by Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in a May congressional hearing — Pam Hemphill, 71, films herself dancing to songs like “Put A Little Love In Your Heart” while waving a Harris-Walz sign, often posing for selfies with supportive passers-by.
“Next week CNN is flying me to New York!” she posted on Facebook Aug. 30, in between more dancing videos and celebrations of milestones like her 45th year of sobriety and the adoption of a new dog. She’s appeared several times on Abby Phillip’s show on the network, as well as NewsNation and a plethora of outlets from across the globe, all wanting to get a piece of the “Ex-MAGA Granny,” as Hemphill bills herself.
Like the name implies, Hemphill was once a supporter of former President Donald Trump — but she wasn’t merely that. One of seven Idahoans to be charged in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, Hemphill — who is freshly back in Boise after a year in South Carolina — served 60 days in federal prison on a misdemeanor count of parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.
“It was a Christmas present from my family, to go [to the Capitol]. ‘It might be his last rally, how would you like to go see Trump?’” Hemphill paraphrased the offer from her brother. “And I thought that would be fun. To me, like going to Disneyland.”
FROM BUNDY TO JAN. 6
A glowing profile in USA Today titled “She once stormed the Capitol for Trump. Now, she’ll be supporting Kamala Harris in November” depicts Hemphill as an impressionable crowd-pleaser who became enamored with Trump at her conservative family’s urging but was pulled out of his “cult” with critical thinking and research.
The article does not mention the times she picketed elected officials’ houses over mask mandates. It does not allude to her past affiliations with the far-right Idaho Liberty Dogs or with militia leader Ammon Bundy, the onetime Emmett resident who gained national attention a decade ago for armed standoffs against the federal government in Nevada and Oregon.
When Bundy announced the formation of his anti-government People’s Rights Network amid COVID-19 restrictions in 2020, Hemphill was among the few dozen attendees who packed into a warehouse to hear him speak, a copy of her self-published book “We Stand! We Rise! We Resist!” resting on a table in front of him.
“For a few years, she was sort of the unofficial videographer of the far-right in Idaho. She’d show up and she’d just be filming the whole time, going and asking people questions — sometimes a friendly interview and sometimes a pretty hostile one,” said Heath Druzin, a podcaster and reporter who covered that 2020 meeting for Boise State Public Radio. “I think that’s why a lot of people were aware of her, because she was always out there filming and pretending to be a journalist.”
The label “citizen journalist” is one that Hemphill has frequently claimed over the years, in her videos at various protests and in the Capitol on Jan. 6. Today, she disavows it.
“Somebody said that ‘people like you are called citizen journalists.’ I’m not a journalist. I don’t want to be a journalist. I’m not educated enough to be a journalist,” she said. “Channel Seven wouldn’t come and cover certain events that the far-right were doing. So I became the news, and that’s how I was able to build [a following of] thousands of people, because there’s nobody else videotaping what was happening.”
In 2020, Hemphill recorded herself falsely telling a sushi restaurant employee that she had a card exempting her from mask mandates under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Not long after, her presence became a fixture at Black Lives Matter protests.
“Every time we had an event, [Hemphill] would show up and she would notify her quote-unquote ‘people’… white supremacists that were in her Facebook feed,” said Terry Wilson, a Black Lives Matter organizer and activist in Boise. “She was the communicator. She was the one who let them know where we were, when we were… once Pam would show up, everybody would show up.”
Then there was the storming of Idaho’s Capitol in August of that year, when Bundy, Hemphill and other protesters crashed the House gallery in defiance of COVID social distancing measures. A glass door was shattered in the melee. Hemphill — who was banned from the grounds after the incident — can be heard referencing it in her video and audio footage from Washington, D.C.
“Let’s do this. Let’s go to the Capitol. We did it in Boise,” she said. “We broke the glass door. Watch the video. I’m with People’s Rights, Ammon Bundy.”
JAN. 6 AND AFTERMATH
“It’s not going to be a FUN Trump Rally that is planned for January 6th, its (sic) a WAR!” Hemphill wrote on Facebook on Dec. 28, 2020. In another post, she posed with what appears to be a firearm and announced that she was “On my way to Washington DC January 6th!” Yet she first became hesitant about the matter, she claims, the night before, when an online acquaintance at her hotel mentioned having bear spray.
“That should’ve been a red flag. What are people doing, talking about bringing bear spray?” she said. “Part of me thought maybe Black Lives Matter, they might run into them or something.”
Later, prosecutors would place her at the front line of the crowd of rioters who breached barriers on the Capitol’s east side, thanks in part to her extensive filmography. She slipped across said barriers several times, urging others to do the same — all while claiming fear of injury to police officers, as she’d recently undergone surgery for breast cancer. Now, she thanks law enforcement for “saving her life” at the Capitol. Then, she disregarded their instructions to leave and made her way inside the building, still egging on other rioters and recording.
At one point in the subsequent months, Hemphill’s Facebook profile was temporarily changed to a “memorial” setting. She claims, without proof, that she was hacked by Black Lives Matter, but that she doesn’t blame them for it now.
“I believe it might’ve been a possibility of what she was doing, maybe pretending to be dead so that the feds wouldn’t prosecute her,” said Michelle Vincent, the committee chair of the Elmore County Democrats.
Hemphill was arrested Aug. 1, 2021. She was represented by a public defender and ultimately, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 60 days in prison at the since-shuttered FCI Dublin in California, where she surrendered herself in July 2022. This was to be followed by three years’ probation and a $500 restitution fine.
Meanwhile, GiveSendGo fundraisers created by Hemphill and her daughter accumulated more than $13,000 in donations. Extremism researcher Noelle Cook, who observed Jan. 6 as an ethnographer, said that this was a turning point for when Hemphill began to lose the trust of her onetime community.
“She immediately took to Twitter [after her release] and continued fundraising. Someone’s sock account asked her, what’s the point of fundraising? You’ve done your jail time, you had public defenders. What are you raising money for? Her response was, ‘I’m a citizen journalist,’” Cook said. “It was to continue the lifestyle of a citizen journalist. In December ‘21, she’d posted a brand-new Mustang online.”
In the winter and spring of 2023, Hemphill was still going on right-wing podcasts and lamenting her prison stretch. By June that year, she had denounced Trump, citing online gaslighting and lying from fellow defendants about the Capitol attack.
Her old social media spaces shunned her for questioning their preferred narrative, she said, while newfound spaces with “real researchers” backed up their positions with facts and evidence.
“I am not a victim of J6,” she wrote on X, then still Twitter. “I pleaded guilty because I was guilty.”
STORIES OF AN ABUSIVE UPBRINGING, AND A MORBID TALE
Histories of sexual abuse, domestic violence and addiction are common among the women convicted of storming the Capitol, according to Noelle Cook. It’s a sentiment shared by Hemphill, though she thinks Cook is one of the architects of an ongoing “smear campaign” against her.
“I’m starting to recognize, these J6 defendants have unresolved childhood abuse. And they’re acting out, and they’re attracted to narcissists like I was,” Hemphill said. “I’ve already researched some of the records of J6 defendants. A lot of them have a history of drug and alcohol addiction.”
Hemphill grew up in Fresno, California, and characterizes her mother, who died in 1997, as “a psychopath” who locked her in closets and pulled her hair.
“Ever seen the movie ‘Misery’? That’s my mother. Crazy. She would switch on you in a second, from being real kind to very violent,” she said.
Her five stepfathers, she says, “were all narcissists” as well.
“I was beaten, molested. I don’t know how I survived to be 13,” she said. “But 13 is when I found alcohol with my friends… [who] stole booze from their family. We were at a park, and they said, want to taste it? I said, why not. That started it.”
She described an adolescence filled with foster homes and stints as a runaway. At 19, she got married for the first of three times, and had her first two children. She thought this would help her put down the bottle, but it did not. Alcoholics Anonymous and its Twelve Steps, she says, saved her life in her mid-twenties, and on Aug. 10 she marked 45 years sober.
The year she stopped drinking is commemorated in her X handle, @PamHemphill79.
Wanting to bring other people out of addiction, in the early 1990s she got a two-year certificate to be an alcohol and drug counselor from California State University, Bakersfield. But at the same time she was completing that program, she was advertising her services in Twin Falls newspapers claiming to be a reverend and to have a master’s degree.
Cook, who participates in many of the same X Spaces as Hemphill, called her out on this long-ago deception and learned that she had been ordained by the Universal Life Church, famous for offering quick “ministry” certifications over the Internet to perform weddings, as well as a variety of honorary degrees.
Inflated credentials are far from the most outlandish claims Hemphill has made over the years. In the film ‘Misery,’ which she frequently invokes when speaking of her mother, Kathy Bates’ character is tried but acquitted for the deaths of several infants in her care at a hospital.
Likewise, Hemphill believes that her mother murdered between 30 and 40 children of immigrants who worked in the grape fields near Fresno in the 1950s. On a February 2023 YouTube show hosted by conspiracy theorist David Zublick, she describes recollections of her mother putting corpses in a wine vat and her child-self finding stray body parts in the closet.
“If you have 30 or 40 kids fermenting in a wine vat, that bottle of wine is probably not going to be to someone’s liking and we’re going to hear about that at some point,” Cook said. “I said to her, ‘do you think it’s possible that your mother was doing midwifery? Is it possible that your mom was performing illegal abortions?’ I would try to go through any logic here, but she’s dead-set on nope, her mom’s a serial killer.”
Hemphill says that she and her brother — who owns the property where she lived in South Carolina for a year, before “politics” drove them apart and her back to Boise — hired a private detective to search for proof of these memories, to no avail.
A TRUE BREAK FROM THE PAST?
As of Sept. 17, Hemphill is officially registered to vote as a Democrat, and proudly plans to cast her ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris, who she rallies for twice weekly at the perimeter of the Capitol she is no longer allowed to enter. She shows up in political T-shirts at community events, still recording footage to post online like in her “citizen journalist” days.
“She was at Boise Pride this last weekend, shooting film, taking selfies with people,” Vincent, the Elmore County Democrats chair, said. “If they knew who she was, I don’t know that anybody there would feel safe with her around.”
Wilson, the Black Lives Matter organizer, said that Hemphill would have to be less performative in her activism if she wants people to believe her shift is genuine.
“If she wanted to engage in some behind-the-scenes work first… then I think her transformation could be acknowledged as a volunteer somewhere, but I think a lot of what she does is for attention,” he said. “She talks a good game. But she talked a good game to her militia buddies, too.”
Hemphill acknowledges that left-wing communities in Boise haven’t exactly accepted her with open arms. Her bi-weekly sidewalk campaign, she says, is her way of “giving back.”
She got rid of all her old Trump memorabilia. But she held on to a face mask bearing the former president’s name that she found on the ground that day in Washington.
I kept that as a souvenir from January 6,” she said.
This story originally appeared in the Idaho Press.
