Meet The ‘Pink Hat Lady’ of the Capitol Riot: ‘It Was Like War’

It’s unlikely that a beekeeping mother of eight who enjoys growing fruits and vegetables, making cheese and—when she made the fateful decision to drive from rural Pennsylvania to the nation’s capital on January 6, 2021—was the manager of a book store, would find herself on an FBI wanted list and be considered among the more prominent “insurrectionists.”

But that’s the fate of Rachel Powell, 43, who has been dubbed the “Pink Hat Lady” or “Bullhorn Lady” and was convicted on nine charges related to her role in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. She heads to federal prison on January 9 to begin serving a four-year sentence after spending nearly three years with an ankle bracelet. Confined to her home, Powell missed the birth of her sixth grandchild and the wedding of a daughter. She also had to leave her position at the book store, she says, and liquidate some of her assets—including her house—to pay legal fees.

In Powell’s view, media outlets have published hundreds of stories painting her as a villain of the January 6 riots, but rarely reached out for her side except when she was in jail and unable to respond. Ahead of her trial, she says, her attorney told her that he’d drop her as a client if she spoke to reporters. (She spoke to journalist Ronan Farrow for a lengthy profile in The New Yorker, but says she didn’t go into detail with him because she hadn’t yet turned herself in to authorities.)

With her prison sentence about to begin, Powell is no longer abiding by such restrictions, and in the course of two hour-long phone interviews with Newsweek she described herself as “numb.”

“The first time I saw court documents that said, ‘The United States of America vs. Rachel Powell,’ it was totally shocking. It was totally surreal,” she said.

ARMED WITH AN ICE AXE AND A BATTERING RAM

Government prosecutors said that on January 6, 2021, Powell was an instigator obsessed with keeping President Donald Trump in the White House despite the official results of the 2020 election.

Her tools to accomplish her alleged task that day were a battering ram, an ice axe and a bullhorn, none of which she denies using. She also acknowledges using inflammatory language on social media that, in hindsight, sounds menacing even to her. And it didn’t help her case that she appeared to be in all of the hotspots that day where violence was at its thickest—at the front of the barricades, on a Capitol balcony and in the tunnel.

What she does dispute is her motivation for behaving the way she did. She wasn’t bent on overturning the government: she was there to surround herself with like-minded people who supported Trump and who believed—vehemently—that there were irregularities in the 2020 election.

Powell’s lack of faith in the integrity of American elections predates 2020, she told Newsweek, and her skepticism was so profound that she didn’t bother to vote in 2016. Reading The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote and How to Get it Back, by progressive commentator Thom Hartmann, reinforced that view, she says.

She voted for Donald Trump in 2020 because businesses were thriving during his administration, and because she believed that forced closures, mask mandates and the push for COVID vaccinations would ease if he were re-elected.

Two weeks before heading to the Capitol on January 6, Powell posted on social media words that came back to haunt her, as prosecutors used them to show she intended to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden.

If Trump successfully tied up the results of the election in court, “it’ll go to the House,” she asserted on Facebook. She urged supporters to call their representatives to determine which way they’d vote, and if they weren’t intending to make “the correct decision … we’ll take it to their homes.”

“We have been patient and tried to go the legal route. It isn’t working and the government isn’t hearing us. It’s time to rise,” read a post one day after the riots.

In another post she wrote, “we have given you all a chance to help us settle this peacefully. We have been patient. The time is up.”

Powell told Newsweek that while she did post menacing comments about government officials, “It doesn’t mean I said it with a plan … we have the right to say angry things in this country.”

Powell says she arrived early at the Capitol building on January 6, before Trump was even done speaking to the crowd, and that because she was so far from him, and from screens projecting his voice and image, she couldn’t see or hear him well.

She had a backpack containing just two items: a healthy snack and a bottle of water. “If I were an insurrectionist, I’d have been the worst one ever,” she jokes.

When she arrived it was peaceful, she says, until police started using flash-bangs, smoke, batons and non-lethal impact weapons. A discharge from the latter ripped open the cheek of a man who stood near her, she says.

Powell provided Newsweek a video, which is embedded in this story, that she took while in the midst of a large crowd prior to violence breaking out. In the video, cops and protesters appear yards away from each other and neither are advancing or retreating.

Audible pops are heard, which Powell says are the sounds of cops firing non-lethal weaponry. Government agencies have acknowledged using such tactics on January 6. Chants of “hands up, don’t shoot” are heard from the crowd. That slogan gives way to “don’t shoot” and “stop shooting,” before the crowd shouts obscenities at the officers.

Powell says the video proves her assertion that the protest was peaceful until police overreacted; prosecutors not only disputed her version but used it against her during sentencing. Instead of expressing remorse, “Powell painted herself and other rioters as the victim of January 6,” prosecutors said in the sentencing memorandum.

Prosecutors used a photograph of Powell with her back against a metal barricade with police in riot gear on the other side, calling it proof she participated in a breach “by shoving a barricade against an officer as the police line broke.”

Powell showed Newsweek video of the incident, where she is seen using her back to push against the barrier before an officer strikes her with a baton multiple times. She covers her face with her arms. When she retreats a few feet from the barrier, an officer grabs her jacket and pulls her toward him, and moments later another shoves her backwards.

Newsweek reached out to the D.C. Capitol Police for comment and will update the story with any response.

“We were not fighting the police, they were fighting us,” Powell maintains. That sentiment, say prosecutors, flies in the face of a social-media post shortly after January 6 where she said police were on the retreat that day “because patriots were relentless.”

According to prosecutors, Powell was in the midst of a group outside the Capitol that “assaulted the retreating officers with fists, makeshift weapons, and various chemical sprays.” While they didn’t accuse her doing any of those things, they said she can be heard yelling to other protesters, “Come on up people, don’t be shy,” even after officers used pepper spray on her.

Prosecutors noted that she stood her ground despite a message that blared over a loudspeaker warning, “All people must leave this area immediately. This order may subject you to arrest and may subject you to the use of a riot control agent or impact weapon.”

Powell says she never heard the warning and didn’t hear any of the officers at the metal barriers give her verbal orders. “Why didn’t they just arrest us?” she asks. “I would have let them.”

Prosecutors’ response? That Powell “blamed the riot on the overwhelmed and outnumbered police for not having arrested each of the thousands of rioters.”

As for the battering ram, photos reveal it was a large, hollow, cardboard tube that was handed to Powell when she was near an overcrowded “tunnel,” a long hallway leading to the Capitol. She assumed it had been used to carry a flag and a pole.

The axe and bullhorn were also handed to her by others, she says, and she used them in search of a safe haven for the many people who were being squeezed so tightly in and around the tunnel that they were falling into a “man pile” just outside the mouth of the tunnel where one woman died.

To Powell it appeared at the time, and still to this day, that the woman, Rosanne Boyland, died because she couldn’t breathe, asphyxiated by the dozen or more people who were on top of her. The D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office ruled she died of acute amphetamine intoxication.

At one point the crowd, sensing that those at the bottom of the pile were in peril, chanted, “I can’t breathe,” the rallying cry at Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd’s death a year earlier. She says the chant, which she heard after she exited the tunnel and was standing near the “man pile,” was designed to encourage police to stop pushing the large crowd backwards.

“The people were piling up and she was dying quicker than we could get people off the pile and save her. But the police kept pushing,” says Powell.

But when three officers attempted to help Boyland, some rioters (not Powell), attacked them with crutches, batons and flag poles, according to video released by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Powell says she used the axe and the cardboard battering ram to break a window so that some in the group near the tunnel could move to open spaces, and the bullhorn to flag a nearby safe haven that she saw on the other side of the glass she had shattered. Authorities say she was mapping out a course for the rioters so that they could further disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

While near the tunnel, Powell told protesters: “We got another window to break to make in-and-out easy” and that they needed to “coordinate together if you are going to take this building.”

She claims her use of the word “you” and not “we” is significant, since she maintains it wasn’t her desire to “take” anything. Prosecutors say that her yelling, “Whose house? Our house!” indicates otherwise.

“It would have ended the chaos in the tunnel by dividing them all up,” she says of her motive for breaking the window that day.

While she claims the police were overly aggressive, she acknowledges that her actions with the bullhorn and the axe made no sense. “It was like war,” she says.

“Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to sit down and be peaceful. And why didn’t we all just run away? What were we going to do? Sit in the Capitol for days without food and water? There was no long-term plan, and breaking a window didn’t help anything,” she told Newsweek.

“I’M NOT CRAZY; I’M HUMAN”

Powell went into hiding after the riot, she says, but online “sedition hunters” were on to her and there was an FBI Wanted poster with her photos.

When she was en route to turning herself in on February 4—her younger children were with their father—the FBI arrived, as did some reporters, while no one was home.

“They bashed in the door and ransacked the place,” she says. Due to the intense media coverage, her children also went into hiding for a time.

The FBI confiscated “go-bags” that she says sounded more threatening in press reports than was the case: there was ammunition that belonged to Powell and was for a firearm she no longer possessed, but the glow sticks and ninja stars were legally purchased as gifts for a son and daughter, she says.

Her children received profane messages via email and social media. “Tell your mom I said fu*k you and she’s a piece of sh*t,” read one.

Powell turned herself in to an FBI satellite office near her home in Sandy Lakes, Pennsylvania, and she spent the next week in a jail cell, an experience she describes as “awful.”

“I know it sounds graphic,” she said, “but I started my menstrual cycle so needed to clean laundry and had to wash it in a sink we drank from.”

While she was in jail, someone left a written sign on her fence calling her a “traitor.” But there was support as well. Because the FBI used a battering ram on her back door, friends who worried for her safety replaced it and refused to accept reimbursement, she says. She sold her house to help pay for $60,000 in legal fees—though half those fees have been taken care of by charitable donations, including $15,000 from the Patriot Freedom Project.

Prosecutors offered a plea deal. It would have put her in prison for four years without the right of appeal, and included admitting to the charge of obstruction of justice. Powell declined: “I can’t sign a paper full of lies,” she said.

Hostile online comments and emails to her boss at the book store made the job untenable. She continued working as an office manager for Joseph Jenkins, Inc., a roofing company. Jenkins told Newsweek that his clients are supportive of Powell. “They’re fairly pissed off about how she’s been treated. A mother, grandmother, gardener, with no criminal record. She’s a full-time employee and taxpayer, and they’re punishing her like she’s Osama bin Laden,” he says.

“I’m not afraid to tell any customer about her, because if they don’t like it, we don’t need them as a customer,” said Jenkins, who describes himself as a political independent who organized the Green party in his county. He and Powell began dating after the riot.

Powell sees a double standard: her online posts were used against her in a court of law while detractors have been free to threaten her—and law enforcement, she says, has declined to investigate.

“Kill yourself tonight nazi bitch. End it. Wrap a noose around your dumb fu*king neck cu*t,” one emailer told her. In another incident, Adam Rahuba, a self-identified “Antifa Leader,” posted online that Antifa was conducting “active ops against Kyle Rittenhouse and Rachel Powell and their families.”

Powell says her lawyer had her participate in a mental health evaluation, which indicated that, due to her childhood experiences—poverty, family instability, a violent neighborhood—when she’s presented with the option to fight or take flight, she’s inclined to stand her ground. “The psych evaluation was very interesting to me,” she says.

“I understood why I didn’t run away. I’ve seen a lot of violence, but that was the first time I was in a position to react. The psych evaluation made me feel better about myself. I’m not crazy. I’m human. Humans do things they shouldn’t have done.”

On advice from counsel, Powell didn’t testify at her trial, and in July she was found guilty of six misdemeanors and three felonies. Three months later, Judge Royce Lamberth sentenced her to pay $8,000 in restitution along with 36 months of supervised release after serving 57 months in prison, though she says her attorney was informed it would be reduced to 51 months.

Powell heads to prison on Tuesday, three days after the third anniversary of the Capitol riot. She’ll do her time at FCI Hazelton, a medium-security facility for women in the Northern District of West Virginia.

At her sentencing, Powell told Judge Lamberth that she was “deeply ashamed” and she apologized to her family “for the hell they have endured because of me.”

“Because I have children, it’s like my heart is being ripped out,” she told Newsweek. “But my children are strong. They were made for this. I was made for this. It can be a blessing to sacrifice your life to shine a light on government overreach and on a system that needs to change.”

Now that she’s had three years to reflect, she said: “I’m remorseful about destroying my family’s life for nothing—in just one day. But I’m not remorseful for believing the election was stolen. We went to bed knowing Trump won Pennsylvania in a landslide and woke up hearing he lost because of mail-in ballots. Nobody I know believes that.”

Powell’s hope, and that of other defendants found guilty of obstructing justice for participating in the Capitol riot, is that the U.S. Supreme Court finds that prosecutors have overused the charge. Formally known in the penal code as 18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(2), the charge was introduced more than 20 years ago in order to combat witness tampering and the destruction of evidence.

The Supreme Court said it will take up the issue by way of defendant Joseph Fischer and the high court could come to a decision by the end of June. If the court were to rule in his favor, it could cause the re-sentencing of Powell and many others.

Outside of that, she appealed her case in November and she also pins her hopes on Trump, who has said he’d pardon “a large portion” of Capitol rioters if he is re-elected president. Powell assumes she won’t be able to vote for him, or anyone else, in the upcoming presidential election given that she’ll be a serving time as a convicted felon.

Trump also met some of Powell’s children at a rally and sent her 12-year-old son a “Save America!” hat with a note that read, “Rachel, we love you.”

“Trump respects people who aren’t afraid to say the election was stolen,” Powell said. “He knows I’m a regular person being persecuted. He recognizes what’s being done to us isn’t justice. I know he’ll pardon me.”