David DePape, 42, grew up in Powell River, British Columbia, before leaving about 20 years ago to follow an older girlfriend to San Francisco. A street address listed for DePape in the Bay Area college town of Berkeley led to a post office box at a UPS store. DePape was arrested at the Pelosi home early Friday morning. San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said she expects to file multiple felony charges, including attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary and elder abuse. Stepfather Gene Depp said the suspect lived with him in Canada until he was 14 and was a quiet boy. “David was never violent from what I saw and never got into any trouble, even though he was very withdrawn and played too many video games,” said Gene Depp. He said he has not seen his stepson since 2003 and has tried to contact him several times over the years without success. “In 2007, I tried to get in touch, but his girlfriend hung up on me when I asked to talk,” said Gene Depp. David DePap was well-known in Berkeley as a nudist activist who had picketed naked at protests against local ordinances requiring people to dress in public. Gene DePape said the girl his son followed to California was named Gypsy and they had two children together. DePape also has a child with a different woman, his stepfather said. Photos published by The San Francisco Chronicle on Friday showed DePape partying naked outside city hall with dozens of others at the 2013 wedding of pro-nudity activist Gypsy Taub, who was marrying another man. Taub did not return calls or emails Friday. A 2013 article in The Chronicle described David DePape as a “cannabis jewelry maker” who lived in a Victorian apartment in Berkeley with Taub, who hosted a local public television talk show called “Uncensored 9/11,” in which was appearing. naked and advanced conspiracy theories that the 2001 terrorist attacks were “an inside job”. A pair of blogs published in recent months on the Internet under the name David DePape featured rants about technology, aliens, communists, religious minorities, transgender people and global elites. An Aug. 24 entry titled “Q” featured a scatological collection of memes that included photos of dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and referred to QAnon, the baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that claims the country is run by a sex-trafficking deep state of children, satanic pedophiles and baby-eating cannibals. “Big Brother deemed your research a thought crime,” read one post that appeared to combine references to QAnon with George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. In an Aug. 25 entry titled “Gun Rights,” the poster wrote: “You no longer have rights. Your basic human rights prevent Big Brothers’ ability to enslave and control you in a complete and total way.” Web hosting service WordPress took down one of the sites Friday afternoon for violating its terms of service. On a different site, someone posting under DePape’s name repeated false claims about COVID vaccines and wearing masks, questioned whether climate change is real and showed a depiction of a zombified Hillary Clinton eating human flesh. There did not appear to be any direct posts about Pelosi, but there were entries defending former President Donald Trump and Ye, the rapper formally known as Kayne West, who recently made anti-Semitic comments. In other posts, the author said Jews helped finance Hitler’s political rise in Germany and suggested an anti-Semitic conspiracy was involved in Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. “The more Ukrainians die INSANELY, the cheaper the land will be for the Jews to buy,” the post said. In a Sept. 27 post, the author said that any journalist who denied Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election “should be dragged straight to the street and shot.”
AP Global Investigative Reporter Michael Biesecker reported from Washington and Breaking News Investigative Reporter Bernard Condon from New York. Reporters Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles, Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco and news researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York contributed.
