Behind a closed, locked door, Nancy Mace sat in her private space. In her separate little lair on the edge of her offices on Daniel Island in Charleston, South Carolina, she wore black leggings and a black blazer and a black hooded blouse. Thick curtains covered the windows to keep out outside sound and light. On the carpet were dog beds for her toy Havanese and crumbled bits of biscuits Liberty wasn’t touching. In one corner was a life-size cardboard cutout of Donald Trump adorned with a shirt and a hat that said “MACE.” In another was a dry erase board with the words “Inflation + Cost of Living” and “Illegal Immigration” and “Crime, Drugs + Public Safety” and “ANYTHING TRUMP” written in blue and “must be substantive!” written in red. On an opposite wall was a bigger board with a different assortment of words — “CUNT” and “BITCH” and “WHORE,” and “Emojis” and “Heart” and “FUCK YOU,” and “thumbs up” and “go girl” and “good.” I looked at it and looked back at her. “We were workshopping replies to certain messages on social media,” she said. “I have, like, an auto-responder.”
“How’s it going?” I asked her.
“That’s a very loaded question.”
“How are you feeling?” I said.
“Cautious,” she said. “It’s a very, I would say, cautious time for me, because I have a lot going on, and I have a lot of folks that are trying to stop me.”
By this point in late January, I had been talking to Mace, and to others around Mace and about Mace, for hours and hours, for months and months. I wanted to know what so many wanted to know and still do. What is happening with this woman? What is happening, or has happened, to her? Why does she say the things she says? Why does she act the way she acts? Is she … OK?
Mace is a 48-year-old twice-divorced mother of two. She often walks with a gun. She sometimes shops in a wig. She always sleeps (the little she sleeps) under a 20-pound heavy blanket she thinks isn’t heavy enough. She says she does what she does because of “an engine” that she “can’t control” and that “just fucking goes” and is “going to go and go and go.” She says she gets the tattoos that she gets because of “the pain that I need to feel.”
And in the wake of her shocking speech last year in which she on the floor of the United States House of Representatives accused her ex-fiancé and three of his business partners and friends of grievous sexual crimes against her and other women — in the spiraling subsequent litigation in which alleged abusers are suing Mace and other alleged victims and vice versa and a judge instituted a gag order for all parties involved and Mace has taken to representing herself — she at times has all but asked to get sent to jail.
She is, according to scores of ex-staffers and ex-friends, operatives and colleagues from both parties and a spectrum of people who know her and have known her for a long time, “unstable” and “unhinged” and “unwell.”
“Something snapped in her mentally,” Charleston-based Republican consultant Chris Drummond told me.
“I hope that she gets the help that she needs,” Charleston-based Democratic consultant Renee Harvey told me.
“You’ll drive yourself crazy,” Democratic state senator Ed Sutton warned me, “trying to understand a crazy person.”
Mace, though, is in her third term in Congress. She flipped her coastal district to Republican. She’s beaten credible opponents in complicated primaries. Now she’s running for governor. She has no chief of staff, no campaign manager and no endorsements from the congressional delegation from her state — and polling and fundraising figures suggest she has at least about as good a chance as anybody else and maybe more in the five-way primary in June. And if no candidate clears 50 percent, a distinct possibility, the top two get pitted in a runoff — a crapshoot. She could win. “She’s driven, she’s smart, she’s funny — she cares,” Clare Considine, her pollster, told me. “I wouldn’t say that she’s crazy. I think that her personality and style are particularly well-suited to how political messages are delivered in the year 2026,” Republican state senator Tom Davis told me. “She’s always operated on the borderline between crazy and brilliant,” former state GOP chair Katon Dawson told me. “Nancy,” he said, “is a force to be reckoned with.”
Politics perpetually has been a redoubt for the wounded seeking to fill the holes that they have. Mace is an utmost example. “My story,” I saw her say at a campaign stop in Spartanburg, “is I am totally broken.” She sees herself as a victim — as a survivor, as a kind of avenger turning “pain into purpose” in service of other victims, but first and foremost as a victim herself. Her father who didn’t show her enough love, her molestation by a friend of her swim coach when she was 14, her rape when she was 16, her trying time as a student at The Citadel from which she was the first female graduate of its formerly all-male Corps of Cadets, her speech on the floor of the state house about her first rape not quite six years before her speech on the floor of the U.S. House about what she believes was her second — her trauma as she tells it has been and remains not an impediment to her political ascent and appeal but its fulcrum and fuel. Her paranoia and her posturing, her antics and her outbursts, her crude talk and her profane provocations, the swings of her political positions not to mention her moods — the evident consequences of her trauma, mounting, compounding — all of it not only hasn’t stopped her but arguably in some strange ways has helped her. She might be the most Donald Trump-like figure in American politics not named Donald Trump. She, at the very least, she says, considers him a “father figure.” In this disruptive era of such twisted incentives — in which attention of any sort is the preeminent font of power, in which intemperance registers for so many as authenticity, in which Trump turned legal and reputational peril into the appearance of persecution into election and then reelection — Mace is perhaps as effective as she is not because she’s altogether well but because she’s altogether not.
“You,” I said in her lair, “are responding to trauma in ways … you don’t totally understand.”
“Correct,” she said.
“But it’s part of what’s animating you,” I said.
“Correct,” she said.
“I would be further ahead in the governor’s race if it weren’t for that,” she said, “but it’s also made me who I am.”
She was, she thought, “the rogue child.”
Her father, Brig. Gen. James Emory Mace, was a Vietnam War hero and the most decorated Citadel alum — Bronze Stars, Silver Star, Purple Heart, the Distinguished Service Cross. Her mother, Anne Jamison Mace, was a teacher with a master’s degree and a doctorate in education. Nancy Ruth Mace, born Dec. 4, 1977, at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, was the last of their three daughters and the third of their four children. Her middle sister, Mary Frances Mace, was the valedictorian of her high school class and went to West Point. Ditto her brother, James Emory Mace Jr., or “Bubba,” an Eagle Scout and a cardiothoracic surgeon — “the perfect son,” her mother told me.
She, on the other hand, was in her own assessment “skinny” and “sensitive” and “prone to sickness” and “often unhappy.” She made her mother clip the tags from her clothes and measure with a ruler the height of her socks. She had trouble making and keeping friends, moving from one military post to the next — Florida, Panama and Pennsylvania, Fort Lewis and Fort Richardson, Fort Benning and Fort Sheridan. She struggled in school. Why, she wailed, was it so easy for her siblings and so hard for her? “My father was gone much of the time and paid little attention to me when he was home,” she recalled. “I sometimes wondered if he even loved me.”
She swam for local club teams. She could, her coach once told a local reporter, “swim forever.” The friend of the coach touched her in the pool, Mace said, and she blamed herself because she had on a neon, two-piece suit. At Stratford High School in Goose Creek, she ran track. She played the clarinet. In her own telling, she was “rebellious,” “anti-everything” and “raged against authority.” She “tried,” she said, “to fit in by partying.”
She says she was raped the summer before her junior year.
“In Goose Creek,” she told me. “By a classmate.”
“At a party?”
“No. We were just hanging out, and he just put himself on top of me and held me down. I wasn’t able to do anything, and nobody was around …”
“And was this a person — I mean, clearly you trusted him?”
“I trusted …”
“A friend,” I said.
“And I was 16, and had never had sex before,” she said, “and he pinned me down with my hands above my head, and he was a lot bigger than me, and there was nothing I could do. I kept telling him no,” she said, “over and over and over again …”
She told her mother. She did not tell her father. She wasn’t worried whether he’d believe her — she was worried what he’d think of her.
Her mother asked her if she wanted to report it. Her mother told me something her mother had told her. “My mother,” said Anne Mace, “had a saying — ‘there’s one side, the other side, and the truth is somewhere in between.’ So I’m not saying that you’re faultless, or that you’re full of fault — it’s just that it’s a range — so you have to evaluate where you are, and what you want to do about it. And I’ll stand behind you, stand with you, but I’m not going to force you.” She didn’t report it. “I believe her, full stop — what happened to her,” her mother told me. “But I was not going to force a 16-year-old to go through that brutal process of reporting it and have it come back on her. That’s being raped,” she said, “all over again.”
Mace dropped out of Stratford. She moved in with her oldest sister in Florida but that didn’t last. She moved home and was homeschooled. In and around town, she heard rumors — she’d gotten pregnant, she’d had an abortion, she’d had a baby. Meanwhile, she was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and put on Ritalin. A friend of hers got killed by a drunk driver after a party she’d gone to too. She “no longer,” she said, “cared whether I lived or died.” She worked as a waitress at a Waffle House and as a secretary at a real estate office and took classes at a community college to get her high school degree.
“My sister,” she told me, “she would tell you I’m stuck in Goose Creek at 16 …”
“When you were raped,” I said.
“And I think she’s right,” Mace said.
The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, looms on the banks of the Ashley River, a fortress of sorts with black iron gates and turret-topped walls. It accepted only men for a century and a half before changing the policy in 1996. Mace drove her white Toyota Corolla the 20 miles from her house in Goose Creek to the campus in Charleston to pick up an application. She told her mother. Her mother told her to tell her father. Strict, stout and chomping on an unlit cigar, he told her she would quit. After all, many men quit. He told her she would fail. After all, many men failed. She told him she wanted the regimentation and routine. She told him she wanted to go where he had gone. She told him she wanted to wear the uniform he had worn. She told him she wanted to make him proud. He told her to read Pat Conroy’s Lords of Discipline. “Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?” he asked.
“My father,” she told me, “has told me no most of my life.”
Physical and psychological toil traditionally has been one of the points of the place — especially for freshmen, or “plebes,” or “knobs.” And reactionary notions of gender were always at the crux of the slog. The Citadel’s “exclusion of women was not simply a relic from the past, but its essential and defining feature,” wrote the lead attorney who challenged the school in court. “All the jocks and knobs who left, they never had the stuff it takes to be a whole man,” Rick Reilly wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1992. “The beaten knobs were the women, ‘stripped’ and humiliated, and the predatory upperclassmen were the men, who bullied and pillaged,” Susan Faludi wrote in the New Yorker in 1994. “Give me a boy, Oh God,” read the school prayer when an 18-year-old Nancy Mace arrived.
Only her father walked her to the barracks. Mothers weren’t allowed.
“I don’t want to see or hear from you until Parents’ Day,” her father told her, they both say. “If you decide to quit, don’t call me to come get you. Just put on your jogging shoes and start walking home.”
He shook her hand.
Her first year was hellish by design. The Citadel’s “fourth-class” process particularly back then effectively operationalized the truism that hurt people hurt people. Upperclassmen hazed underclassmen because older upperclassmen had hazed them. “They had taught me about the power and the abuse of power,” wrote the late Conroy, a grad of the school and its de facto bard. “We were learning,” he said in Lords, “the art of being victims.” One way to get by was to be a “ghost knob,” on hand but unobtrusive, just trying “to blend in” — an impossibility for Mace, one of just four women of some 1,800 cadets at the start of the fall semester and one of just two by its end. Mace was made to have her hair shorn not as short as the men but close. In class she mostly sat alone — the “area around me,” she said, “a small island of isolation.” At football games, according to Mace, booze-breathed alums and the women with them called her a “bitch” and a “slut” and a “dyke.” They jeered in the women’s room that she should be in the men’s room.
Her second year her father had become the commandant of cadets — the chief disciplinarian — hired in part to crack down on harassment of knobs. Her peers grumbled this granted her special treatment or status. In fact, it made what she really wanted all the harder to attain. “While I’m the commandant,” her father told her, “you’re not my daughter. You’re just another cadet.” She had to make an appointment to see him. He never checked on her. He “made a very conscious effort to avoid her,” he told ABC News at the time. “Until her senior year toward the end of school,” he told me when I spoke to him, “I didn’t know where her room was in the barracks.”
Her third year she was set to graduate a year early on account of community college credits. She had gotten emails from strangers, she says, saying she was a “disgrace” and that she had “ruined” the school and that “everyone hates her.” She had been shown by administrators how to recognize a bomb in the mail. She in fitness tests had done more pushups than many of the men and more sit-ups than many of the men and run faster than most of the men. She had written for the school newspaper — including the article about her father becoming the commandant. (“He intends to be ruthless,” she wrote.) She had played her clarinet in the band. She had made the President’s List, the Dean’s List and the Commandant’s List. She had finished her degree in business administration with a grade point average of better than 3.7. “Stone Face,” some in her company called her. Under her smiling picture in her yearbook: Proverbs 24:10. “If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.” At her commencement she was nauseous and pale. In full “Salt and Pepper” dress — gray top, red sash, white skirt — she walked across the stage toward her father.
He had tears in his eyes. He handed his daughter her diploma.
“And I gave my dad a hug, and that’s what I had been looking forward to for three years,” she told reporters.
He was “elated,” he said. She was “tough as nails,” he said. “The first female graduate — I would be proud regardless,” he said in Charleston’s Post and Courier, “but she’s my daughter, so that is particularly rewarding. Alumni say, ‘If we have to have women, she’s the kind of woman we want.’ And for my ego,” he said, “that is very good.”
“I recognize it, and I feel it, but it’s fleeting,” she told me. “I don’t take it for granted, I do recognize and acknowledge that — yes, he does love me, he is proud of me, in that moment, 100 percent, yes. I would be remiss if I didn’t — but that doesn’t mean that I feel value …”
“So do you think you’re not …”
Her blue-green eyes welled.
“Good enough,” she said.
She married fast. Her wedding to a classmate from The Citadel was at the chapel at The Citadel. Christopher Niemiec was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia and she did some substitute teaching after working for Andersen Consulting. “It wasn’t a good fit,” Mace told me. “He didn’t want me to do the book.” In the Company of Men: A Woman at the Citadel came out in 2001. She was divorced by 2002.
In 2004, she re-married — Curtis Jackson, a software engineer. They lived in Atlanta. She got a master’s degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of Georgia. And in 2005, she interviewed to be the press secretary for Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina. It “didn’t work out,” she said. Sanford declined to comment, but Chris Drummond was his communications director. “She had her book, and talked about that,” Drummond told me. “At the end,” he said, “Sanford leaned over and says, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘I think it’s a terrible idea. It’s all about her and not about you.’”
She had her son in 2006 and her daughter in 2009. At this early juncture primarily a stay-at-home mother, she sought to be ardently present and nurturing. “Curtis and I believe in the value of what some might call extreme parenting … or sometimes referred to as ‘attachment parenting,’” she once said. “You have them in bed with you until they start into their own bed, when they are ready, usually between the ages of three and five. You wear your children! You nurse longer, for two or three years. I call it a ‘granola’ way of parenting.”
Spurned at a lower rung of a conventional path to the political arena in the second term of the presidency of George W. Bush, Mace found a less humdrum, more puckish, unwittingly innovative way in. Still in Atlanta, she joined forces in 2007 with the Columbia-based Will Folks, something of a scallywag of a former Sanford and Nikki Haley aide and the provocateur proprietor of a blog called FITSNews.com — then a shock-jock hodgepodge of South Carolina political news and gossip, pop culture, sports and racy pictures of women. Mace, stressed and breast-feeding her colicky kids, dug it. “He used words that nobody else was using,” she said. “He would curse.” She redesigned the site and stood up a revenue stream. In 2008, she started the Mace Group, a consulting company that tapped into FITS-adjacent networks to drum up business doing email, data and social media work for state lawmakers and agencies. But the linchpin of the rise of Mace in Palmetto State politics was her alliance with Folks and FITS. “The vibe I got from her was not somebody looking to leverage a relationship,” Folks told me. “She was a partner.”
And then in 2010 in the thick of Haley’s gubernatorial campaign, Folks announced he’d had a few years before “an inappropriate physical relationship with Nikki” — “numerous instances of inappropriate sexual contact,” he said. Haley, a married mother of two, “emphatically” denied it. The spokesperson for Folks in the flap was Mace — by then the president and co-owner of the site.
In the end, though, FITS put her at the vanguard of what was to come. Her relationship with “the bad boy” of the political scene of the state was a key, in the words of one longtime GOP consultant with deep South Carolina ties. She garnered a reputation for being “flirty,” “flaunty” and “crass,” said another. “If Will was the playboy,” this person said, “she was the playgirl.”
She was, said Republican state senator Larry Grooms, one of her clients, “on the forefront of … almost like in-your-face politics.”
“You ask most Democrats how to get into politics, they tell you to run for your city council, run for your state house,” former Charleston Democratic Party chairman Sam Skardon told me. Mace’s way? “Get yourself a platform with eyeballs.”
But she wanted more than eyeballs — more than mere attention. She wanted to run for office and win. In the 2012 cycle, she had volunteered on the presidential campaign of the libertarian Ron Paul; in the ‘14 cycle, she had primaried Lindsey Graham from the Tea Party right and lost; in the ‘16 cycle, she had worked on Trump’s campaign as a field and coalitions director in South Carolina and other states. Now, in 2017, in a state house special election, she eyed the seat on Daniel Island.
She called, of all people, Chris Drummond — from her unsuccessful interview with Sanford. “I said,” said Drummond, “‘There’s someone else running in this particular race I don’t care for.’” He’d work for her, he told her, because “he’s worse than you.” She was “surprised,” in his recollection, but undeterred. “She said, ‘Can you send me a contract?’”
She ran against a mental health counselor. In a debate, her opponent called Mace “alt-right,” and they refused to shake hands. Mace got 56 percent of the vote.
In Columbia in 2019, finalizing her second divorce, already considering a congressional bid and calibrating for what was then squarely a swing district held by Democrat Joe Cunningham, Mace struck a more moderate pose — opposing, for instance, offshore drilling while also supporting national background checks notifying ICE if an unauthorized immigrant tried to buy a gun. In February, she racked up headlines, too, by taking to task Democratic women in Congress who attended the State of the Union in “suffragist” all white. “The point of breaking glass ceilings is so that, after they’re broken,” she posted on Facebook, “it doesn’t matter anymore.”
She got even more attention in late April when she argued for an amendment for exceptions for incest and rape in a bill to ban an abortion after any detection of a heartbeat. The previous September, when Christine Blasey Ford accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in high school and Kavanaugh denied it, Mace had weighed in. “I’m very empathetic to women who’ve been through this type of situation. But on the other side, we have laws in this country that protect individuals from being wrongfully accused,” she told the Associated Press — noting, with no details but out in the open for the first time, that she had been sexually assaulted as a teen. Now, though, on the floor of the state house, she said more.
“There are women in this room that I have talked to since putting in this exception, this amendment, who are also victims like me,” Mace said. “But I don’t see us as victims. I see us as survivors,” she said. “For the women who might be watching this today, and watching our debate throughout the afternoon, it is not your fault. I’m going to say it again. It was not your fault. And it took me 25 years to be able to get up here and talk about this publicly.”
Some of her male Republican colleagues pushed back. “If the victim of the rape should not be blamed, then why should the product of the rape also be blamed?” one of them said.
“I’m beginning to think some of you think all women who are raped lie about being raped,” Mace said. “If you do a little bit of research, you’ll see that 80 percent of women who’ve been sexually assaulted do not report the rape or the sexual assault. And do you know why they don’t report rape or incest? They are horrified about the experience they’ve just been through. There is physical and emotional trauma,” she said. “My mother and my best friend in high school are the only two people that knew,” she said. “And while I am pro-life — and I would hope and pray that any woman or teenager who is raped or assaulted or is a victim of incest … would choose life — I am not going to take that away from anybody else.”
Other Republicans left on her desk a card from a group angling for no abortions at all. “It is a twisted logic that would kill the unborn child for the misdeed of a parent,” it said. “Calling rape a misdeed is ignorant” and “disgraceful,” Mace told The State in Columbia. “One of the most detestable things that I have seen in my 21 years in the General Assembly,” House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford, the top Democrat in the legislature, told the newspaper — saying Mace after she saw it on her desk was “visibly shaken.”
The local story became a national story — and amounted to Mace’s first turn in such limelight since The Citadel. “That language is so degrading toward women, particularly victims of rape or incest,” she told USA Today. “And I am not going to put up with that bullshit.”
Intentional or not — and she says it wasn’t — her heightened talk of her trauma was her runway to Congress. Less than a month later, she announced her candidacy. The following November, she was South Carolina’s first Republican woman ever elected.
She stood at a lectern in a mostly empty House chamber. Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Anna Paulina Luna of Florida sat behind her — there to support their friend. Mace’s mother sat in the gallery up above. “I was very worried,” she told me. “I didn’t want her to be hurt. I didn’t want her to be sued. I didn’t want her to be maligned.”
Mace had on her right ring finger her Citadel Ring. She had with her a Bible and some handcuffs.
“I rise today,” she said on the evening of Monday, Feb. 10, 2025, “to call out the cowards who think they can prey on women and get away with it. Today, I am going scorched Earth. So let the bridges I burn this evening light our way forward,” she said. “God placed this burden on my path not to crush me but to ignite something within me …”
Mace always had been one of the more mercurial members of Congress — pro-LGBTQ rights until she wasn’t, pro-Trump until she wasn’t (until she was …), persistently piqued by legions of aggrieved ex-aides due to her highs and her lows and her all-hours demands. This speech came after a 2021 and ’22 in which she purportedly wanted to get “punched in the face” by a rioter on Jan. 6 so she could get on TV and said on CNN that Trump’s legacy had been “wiped out,” went to New York to make a video in front of Trump Tower to remind voters that she was with Trump from the start, got engaged to the man who would’ve been her third husband (“… her mom says, ‘She can be hard to love’ … but I do hard things,” he posted on his socials), and beat a Trump-endorsed candidate in the primary to get re-elected. And this speech came after a 2023 and ’24 in which she talked about her sex life in her public remarks at a prayer breakfast, told a reporter from The New York Times while drinking a skinny margarita that Trump triggered her as a survivor of sexual assault and that she would not support him were he to be the GOP nominee, jilted Kevin McCarthy’s advisers as well as her own by voting against him for Speaker and then donned a “Scarlet A,” broke up with her fiancé, lost (she says) 20 pounds in 10 days, had a benign tumor removed from her uterus without (she says) anesthesia, got in rapid succession her first nine tattoos in the midst of losing or firing every one of her staffers in D.C., jousted on air with George Stephanopoulos when he asked her how she could support Trump after all when he had been found liable for sexual abuse (“I find it offensive that as a rape victim you’re trying to shame me for my political choices,” she told him), hounded transgender Delaware Democrat Sarah McBride by insisting on calling her “Tim” and working to bar her from using the women’s rooms at the Capitol … and still drubbed a McCarthy-backed primary opponent and got re-elected again while actually outperforming Trump in the vast majority of the precincts in her district. But now …
“Today, I am going to free myself from the monster who broke me,” she said. “Today, I will free other women who fell prey to the same man,” she said. “Today, I will free other women further from a group of men who committed the most evil acts against them.”
If on the floor of the state house in South Carolina she had turned her trauma into political potential and then power, here on the floor of the U.S. House she turned that power into … what? Justice? Retribution? Revenge?
“Traumatized people relive the moment of trauma not only in their thoughts and dreams but also in their actions,” the psychiatrist Judith L. Herman wrote in her seminal book on the topic. “Most commonly, traumatized people find themselves reenacting some aspect of the trauma scene in disguised form,” she wrote, “without realizing what they are doing.”
“Many of the boys who suffered most grievously would turn into the cruelest guidon corporals, the most sadistic platoon leaders. That was the way it was with the system; that was the way it was with the human race,” Conroy wrote in Lords, a signed copy of which Mace keeps on a shelf in her office on the Hill. “I had seen it happen,” Conroy wrote, “over and over and over again …”
“In November 2023, I accidently uncovered some of the most heinous crimes against women imaginable — rape, nonconsensual photos and videos of women and underage girls, and the premediated, calculated, exploitation of innocent women and girls in my district,” Mace said on the floor. “Today, you will hear about the depraved men behind these gutless, evil acts,” she said. “These men didn’t just harm their victims. They recorded their depravity as if it were a badge of honor,” she said. “When I uncovered evidence of rape, the illegal filming of women and sex trafficking, I didn’t just see victims. I saw a system that failed to protect them,” she said. “These predators are not untouchable. These predators are not invisible. These predators are not invincible,” she said. “Let me say their names for the record in alphabetical order,” she said, permanently etching what she was saying into this country’s congressional annals. “To Eric Bowman, Patrick Bryant, Brian Musgrave and John Osborne: You have bought yourself a one-way ticket to hell,” she said, “so I and all of your victims can watch you rot for an eternity.”
She said Bryant, her former fiancé, gave her access to his phone, and that she saw on the phone a video of a woman who was “incapacitated” and “being raped.” She said she saw “some photos of what appeared to be a teenager undressed.” She said she saw a video of “another woman who was naked, clearly on a camera, unaware she was being filmed. She was slender. She had long brown hair. I turned up the volume to hear if there was audio. I heard my voice. I zoomed in on the video. And that woman was me.”
The more Mace spoke, the harder it was at times to keep track — what precisely she was alleging, whom precisely she was accusing. “This monster stole my body. It felt like I had been raped,” she said. She said she found a “hidden camera” at “a property” owned by Bryant and Musgrave. She said she “found an app where the file of at least one of the hidden cameras I discovered was stored,” and that on that app she found “10,633 videos” — “file after file after file,” she said. “I am just one person. Imagine how many victims there truly are,” she said, “victims of this cabal of rapists, this cabal of sex traffickers, this cabal of peeping toms,” she said. “One night in 2022,” she said, “I was served two small vodka sodas,” she said. “A short time later, I blacked out,” she said. “My memories of that night are just flashes in and out of the dark, flashes in and out of the night. I was raped that night. Was it Patrick Bryant? I don’t know. But I was raped,” she said. “Was anyone else there? Was it filmed? Was it sold on the dark web? I have no idea, but I know what these men do to their victims,” she said.
Clear, though, was her conviction. Her intention. “During the last year, as I turned everything over to law enforcement I was told — I, as a victim — would be investigated. Investigated for what? I am a victim here,” she said. “During the last year, more than once, I was told I could be arrested if I moved forward. Arrested for what?” she said. “I brought handcuffs with me today. If anyone would like to arrest me for standing up for women, here are my wrists,” she said.
And she chastised South Carolina’s attorney general — one of her main opponents in the gubernatorial field — for not doing enough, she said, to respond. “Alan Wilson, you are not a real man, because real men protect women.” And she listed the bills she said she had filed as a result — codifying a presumption that she’d be shielded by the so-called Westfall Act that gives federal employees immunity for things they do in the scope of their employment or the Speech or Debate Clause in the Constitution that allows members of Congress to say on the floor almost anything without being subject to being sued by almost anybody. The Stop VOYEURS Act and the Sue VOYEURS Act and the Rape Shield Enhancement Act. The Stop the Invasion of Women’s Spaces Act. The Protecting Women’s Private Spaces Act. She cited Romans 12:19 (“… leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written: ‘Vengeance is mine …’”).
“Had I never found out I was a victim, I would never have known to dig deep to find other victims,” Mace said. “There is power in the brokenness we feel. Ladies, find your death goddess. Find that death goddess energy and use it,” she said. “Your wound is my wound. Your wound is our wound. Your pain is our pain, and your fear is our fear. This is who you are,” she said, “and this is your superpower.”
The fallout was fast and far.
All four men denied Mace’s accusations. Bryant called the speech “betrayal and lies.” Osborne said her claims were “categorically untrue.” Bowman said her allegations were “baseless, repugnant and defamatory.”
Wilson said through a statement from his office that Mace “either does not understand or is purposefully mischaracterizing the role of the attorney general” and that his office had “not received any reports or requests for assistance from any law enforcement or prosecution agencies regarding these matters.”
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division confirmed it had “opened an investigation regarding allegations of assault, harassment and voyeurism on Dec. 14, 2023, after being contacted by the United States Capitol Police.” The SLED investigation, according to a spokesperson, is “active and ongoing.”
And on March 14, kickstarting the cluster of lawsuits, Musgrave sued Mace. “While the speech and debate clause,” his attorneys wrote in their initial complaint, “affords broad protection to members of Congress acting as part of its deliberative process, it does not transform the floor of Congress into a sanctuary for defamation.” They wrote that “it is with unbridled disgust that Brian Musgrave through this lawsuit is forced to utter the words: ‘I am not a rapist.’”
“What if we’re witnessing a real mental breakdown?” Bowman said on X on April 9.
“Get the fuck out of my face,” Mace told a man in an Ulta cosmetics store in South Carolina a couple weeks after that. “Stay the fuck away from me.”
“Tranny, tranny, tranny,” she told a transgender woman a couple days after that.
“As I tell my clients, ‘I can save you from outside forces, but I can’t save you from yourself,’” Wesley Donehue, a former Mace consultant, wrote in his book in 2022. He stopped working for Mace in August of 2024. He declined to comment for this article but did sit for a deposition in April of 2025 — a case that eventually drew sanctions from a judge against Bryant and his attorney. “I think she believed Patrick was cheating on her,” he said in the deposition. “I believe that she believed that he had a bunch of creepy pictures, and I believe that that pushed her over the edge to start making very emotional and erratic decisions,” he said. “Nancy,” he said, “she’s always the victim. She’ll use anything to be able to say that she’s the victim — that someone hurt her, someone keyed her car, someone slashed her tire, someone vandalized her house …” He said he was worried she was “losing her mind.”
Mace made a beeline for me. We’d never talked. We’d never met. But I’d called some of her staff to let them know I was interested in working on a story like this. “What’s your end goal?” she said to me after a press conference in Charleston in June. “Don’t tell me you don’t have one. Because I know you do.”
“My end goal is the same as any and every profile I’ve ever done for POLITICO,” I said, “which is to help our readers understand you.”
“You have to understand this is going to be traumatic for me,” she said. “I have PTSD over what I’ve been through …”
“In what ways …”
“If you talk to people who physically harmed me,” she said, “it’s going to be deeply traumatic for me.”
“Are there people,” I asked, “that you’re specifically asking me not to talk to?”
“You do whatever you want,” she said. “But my speech is very, very detailed on that, and it’s an extremely traumatic thing for me, and I have a lot of PTSD, and it might get to a point where I just can’t talk to you,” she said. “I’m in intense therapy for it,” she said, “so I would just be mindful of that.”
“I will be very mindful of that,” I told her. “I’m not here to cause damage. I’m here to write a fair profile.”
“That’s fine, but it’s triggering for me,” she told me, tearing up and turning away. “So I’m going to — I’m going to go …”
In August I went to watch her make it official that she was running for governor. She did it at The Citadel. Her mother, now 83 with Parkinson’s but still sharp, was there. Her father, 85 and physically more and more frail, was not. I went to Greenville to see her host a town hall at Bimini’s Oyster Bar & Seafood Café. A person with rainbow shoelaces shouted into a bullhorn outside. “Why are you so afraid of people who are different?” the protester hollered, over and over and over again. “Why do you live with such hatred and fear?” I went to Spartanburg to see Mace at a dinner for a local club for Republican women. “My pastor jokes with me — he says I’m the woman at the well. You guys know the story. I mean, she’s so broken, so completely broken, and needs to be saved, and Jesus is the first one to tell her he’s the Savior, and it changes her life,” she said. “So my story,” she said, “is I am totally broken.”
In October we sat at a table on the patio of an Italian restaurant on Daniel Island on a Friday afternoon when the government was shut down. Dressed in a denim button-down, tight black jeans and violet stilettos, she drank a glass of Brunello before having another glass or two from a bottle of red an adviser went to fetch from her office across the street. Her bodyguard scanned live oaks for deadly threats. We talked for more than four hours. “I’m in a great place,” she said. “I’m a lot better than I’ve been in a long time,” she said. “The best I’ve been in two years,” she said. “I think I have more confidence now,” she said, “than I’ve ever had.” I was “catching” her “on a wave,” she said. A judge had ruled against Musgrave and in favor of Mace in a decision his attorneys denounced. She said there were so many victims, though, and now more and more victims were coming to her for help, and this was why she had left the closed-door House Oversight meeting in Washington the month before with victims of Jeffrey Epstein in tears, because of a “full blown panic attack,” because “I feel the immense pain of how hard all victims are fighting,” but she could help victims, because she was a victim. She had to. “It’s probably the glue that’s keeping me together,” she said. She told me about her fundraising and her polling and the numbers of her followers and her compilation of Google search data and she showed me on the screen of her phone some of the charts that she said she had made. “I did 30 days, I did 90 days, I did a year,” she said. “I’m blue, red is Lindsey Graham, yellow is Tim Scott, green is Nikki Haley,” she said. “I have more name ID and branding than three former people that ran for president,” she said.
“I sent this to the president,” she said.
“You sent all that to your father figure?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Did you send it,” I said, “to your father?”
She stared at me.
“That was cold,” she said. She laughed with a snort. “No,” she said. “I didn’t send it to my dad. I sent it to the other fatherly figure. And I said to him … I don’t know how this happened. I literally said to him in my text, ‘I don’t know how …’”
“So you send that to him hoping for an endorsement,” I said, “or do you send that to him hoping for something more important?”
“What’s more important,” she said, “than an endorsement?”
“Acknowledgment,” I said.
“I think part of it’s acknowledgement,” she said. “Acknowledgment that I’m doing well,” she said. “Approval.”
In November I went to see her in Columbia. It was the week after she’d told law enforcement officers at the airport in Charleston, according to a report from the airport police, that she wasn’t “going through your TSA line,” that she was a “fucking representative,” that they were “fucking idiots,” that they were “fucking incompetent.” Scott said it was “never acceptable to berate officers.” Graham said he agreed. Trey Gowdy, the former South Carolina congressman and current Fox News host, called her behavior “psychotic.” Mace called the report partly “falsified” and said the incident “appears to be yet another example of the weaponization of government agencies against a conservative.” We stood outside the state capitol. “I was the one that had over 1,300 death threats last year,” Mace told me. People around the country have been charged with threatening to kill her. Charlie Kirk had been assassinated not two months before. “I’m not crazy,” Mace said.
A week later, she flouted advisers and also Trump, risking the prospect of his endorsement by signing a discharge petition — one of just four House Republicans to do so — to force a vote on a bill to compel the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files. “She described it to me as: ‘I never got justice for what I went through, and I’m not going to be the person who holds up justice for someone else,’” Mike Hahn, a Mace consultant, told me.
“Nancy Mace,” attorneys for Bryant and Bowman wrote in court records in early January, “has repeatedly disparaged and defamed Patrick Bryant, Eric Bowman and John Osborne by calling them ‘rapists,’ ‘criminals,’ and ‘predators’ during Congressional speeches and through her social media platforms.” They called her conduct “deplorable.”
A couple weeks after that, Mace and I were back on Daniel Island, in her office with the curtains to keep out the outside sound and light.
I still wanted to know if she was OK.
I wanted to know how to end this story.
“I don’t know that I’ll ever be OK with myself,” she said.
“There’s no end of the story where I’m whole,” she said.
“She’s not crazy,” Mary Frances Mace, her sister, told me. “I would say she’s intense. I don’t think she’s crazy at all. I think sometimes we get emotional and that emotion comes out in a certain way. But no — she’s not crazy,” she said. “I think it kind of also minimizes things she’s gone through. When someone says something like that, if they don’t know her and understand why she’s saying something the way she’s saying it or acting the way she’s acting, then they don’t know her.”
Nancy Ruth Mace says she’s alone and will never not be alone. “A caucus of one,” she has said. “I don’t have any friends,” she has said. She says she’s been celibate for more than two years. She says she got her tattoos not just to feel “the pain that I need to feel” but to “reclaim” her body — her identity. One of her tattoos is the first sentence of one of Virginia Woolf’s most noted novels: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Woolf thought she was going mad and couldn’t bear it and walked into a river with her pockets filled with stones. “I’m showing up to a family court hearing for a mom in a couple of weeks. I’m showing up to another court hearing for the family member of a murder victim in a couple of weeks,” Mace told me. “It’s just my reaction and my response,” Mace said. “And it keeps me alive.” And on the escalating Epstein matter, on principle plus some sense of the pulse of the base, she hasn’t backtracked — if anything, she’s stepped up her party-bucking, Trump-crossing posture. “She has shown great courage on the Epstein issue,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told me. It might end her electoral career. It also might not.
She is also going, of course, to court appointments of her own and on her own. The courtroom at this point isn’t getting in the way of her campaign. The courtroom is part of the campaign. The filing of documents pro se, the exchanging of encrypted messages with other victims (“I swear to god if they try to gag me I will willingly go to jail for using my first amendment,” she texted one of them, according to court records), the round-the-clock posting on social media about all of it — it’s not the stuff, say Mace and her staff, that’s getting in the way of the job that she has and the job that she wants. “This is the stuff,” Cameron Morabito, her director of operations, once told me in an SUV idling outside a law office. The stunting and the trolling, the bottomless grievance, the hypervigilance of enemies real and perceived — whether it’s intuitive, strategic or both, Mace is running her version of Trump’s playbook. “Without Donald Trump, there is no Nancy Mace,” she once told me. “I don’t exist without Trump. I do not exist. It doesn’t happen. That’s a hundred percent correct. A hundred percent accurate. Somebody like me would never be able to run and win.”
In the closed, locked lair, the cardboard cutout kept watch. Liberty puttered about. The printer churned.
“I learned,” she said, “you could file letters in the court, and now they’re public, so I wrote this long letter.”
“I respectfully inform this Honorable Court: I will not be SILENCED,” she wrote, arguing on her own behalf against the judge’s gag order, a slurry of caps, italics and bolds — part of a broader (and successful) effort to move the litigation from state to federal court. “When I delivered my floor speech almost one year ago, I brought handcuffs and said: “If anyone would like to arrest me for standing up for women, here are my wrists.” That offer stands today. I would rather sit in a cold dark cell than abandon South Carolina’s daughters who are counting on me to fight for them. … I continue to live looking over my shoulder. Endure sleepless nights. And continue to be harassed and defamed by those who feel emboldened to continue their abuse in this Court. … The gag order as it stands is unconstitutional and unenforceable and therefore, Your Honor, I yield to no man who seeks to silence the truth.”
“My mom gave it to my dad,” Mace told me, “and he read it. He’s, like, ‘She needs to go to law school,’” she said. “You don’t have the right to gag me,” Mace said. “I’m 100 days out from an election. I’m doing my job.”
“And in the meantime,” I said, “you got a compliment from your dad.”
“I did get a compliment from my dad,” she said.
“First one in a long time,” she said. “Felt good.”
We’d been talking for most of the afternoon and into the early evening. “Want to go have a drink across the street?” she said. She stood up to leave. On the back of the door was a taped piece of paper. “NANCY MACE,” it said, “WILL BE GOVERNOR.”
