A Berwyn woman alleges that far-right influencer Nick Fuentes pepper sprayed her and pushed her down his front steps on Sunday.
Marla Rose, a 57-year-old writer and co-founder of a vegan lifestyle website, captured the incident with a video on her phone.
The incident comes after Fuentes’ address leaked online last week after he posted on X, formerly Twitter, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” as the 2024 election results favoring President-elect Donald Trump rolled in.
Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier who has praised Adolf Hitler, is a Lyons Township High School graduate. He drew national headlines in 2022 after he dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, though the relationship has frayed.
Rose had heard of Fuentes but knew little about him until the post went viral. After his address leaked, she saw that he lived just about 10 minutes away from her.
She decided to go to the address on Sunday. As she recorded a video she was going to send to her friends, a passing driver said she should ring his doorbell. She followed through, hoping to speak to him directly.
“I didn’t expect he was going to answer the door, but if he did I was going to ask him, ‘What are you thinking posting that kind of hateful, violent rhetoric to your giant platform?’” she told the Sun-Times.
Before Rose could ring the doorbell, Fuentes opened the door and allegedly sprayed her with something, which she thinks was pepper spray. The video she posted on Facebook shows her falling to the ground, which she said was because Fuentes pushed her. Her phone fell with her.
Rose curled up into a ball to brace for more physical violence, but Fuentes instead took her phone into his home.
The person on the street who told Rose to ring the doorbell called the police. They took her account of what happened, and also spoke briefly with Fuentes, she said. The police also retrieved from Fuentes her now-broken phone.
Rose said her right arm is bruised and in pain, and she planned to get it examined by a medical professional.
In a statement to the Sun-Times, Fuentes said, “Don’t show up at somebody’s front door looking to cause problems.” He did not give an account of the incident.
Rose said her address has leaked. Rose believes supporters of Fuentes have swatted — an act where one tells an emergency service to go to a person’s address — her home a few times, and she believes they’re behind multiple Domino’s Pizza orders that have come to her vegan household.
Rose said she is seeking legal counsel but hasn’t decided whether to press charges. While she doesn’t regret what she did, she wouldn’t recommend others to do the same.
“It was just a moment I got carried away,” she said. “But I’ve been really heartened by the response from the world, really, of support and toward me.”