John Fetterman’s Wife Reportedly Told Staff She Was at a ‘Breaking Point’

More recently, after Donald Trump won reelection, Fetterman and Gisele reportedly fought as she didn’t want to accompany him to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. “It was a whole saga,” said a former staffer. “She wasn’t going to go, and they had fights about it.” Fetterman reportedly, insultingly told his wife to take this as an opportunity “to showcase what a model Dreamer looked like in an effort to get the president-elect to soften his views on illegal immigration. If she didn’t go, Fetterman said, she’d lose the right to complain about whatever he did as president,” Terris wrote. Gisele was once undocumented, and Fetterman often invoked her story on the campaign trail—only to recently align with Trump and Republicans on a hard-line approach to immigration. One staffer told Terris that Fetterman “said in a small group with senior staff, ‘I told her to put up or shut up. If she doesn’t go, I don’t want to hear about it.’” What a lovely way to talk about your wife, whose story you used to help you win an election!

In March, staffers also say Fetterman took an early-morning trip to Hartford, Connecticut, without explanation. When Gisele wanted to know why Fetterman was missing one of their kids’ birthdays, they had no answer.

Still, Gisele has continued to publicly stand by Fetterman, even traveling to Israel to meet and take photographs with Israeli Prime Minister and internationally wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu that same month. Gisele also wound up joining Fetterman for his meeting with Trump in December. According to the magazine, as recently as February, Fetterman reportedly said of Palestinians in a meeting with a pro-Israel group, “You can’t reform a carton of sour milk” and “kill them all.” 

In a statement for the story, Gisele blamed pretty much everything on Fetterman’s former chief of staff and close confidante, Adam Jentleson, claiming Jentleson repeatedly misled her about Fetterman’s health, and denying most of Terris’ reporting. She accused Jentleson of being part of a conspiracy against her husband and said he fed her “scary, untrue stories about John’s health.” She explained, “I would talk to John’s doctors about what Adam was telling me and they would be confused. Those doctors would tell me that their concerns were not with John, but with Adam. Any alleged ‘concerns’ heard from me came straight from those lies, not from John’s doctors or my own eyes.” In response to these accusations, Jentlesen told Terris, “I stand by everything I said, and I hope Senator Fetterman gets the help he needs.” Take from all that what you will, I guess!

While hospitalized in 2023, Fetterman reportedly suffered intense delusions: He told doctors he suspected family members were wearing wires and recording him and hallucinated political rallies happening around him. Other staffers recount that Fetterman sometimes seemed to believe he was being followed by shadowy figures. One doctor attributed the delusions during his hospital stay to lingering effects from his 2022 stroke, dehydration, and complications with his medications. But his removal from reality persisted even after he left the hospital, former staffers said, recounting their recurring concerns that Fetterman wasn’t taking his medications. 

In a May 2024 letter to Fetterman’s doctors, Jentleson wrote, “We do not know if he is taking his meds and his behavior frequently suggests he is not… We often see the kind of warning signs we discussed.” In the letter, Jentleson recounted how Fetterman had recently bought a gun, and appeared to suffer from “conspiratorial thinking” and “megalomania,” seeing himself as a distinguished expert on Israel and Gaza solely from reading news articles, for instance. Perhaps most concerning, Jentleson and other staff accused Fetterman of actively endangering himself and others with extreme reckless driving, frequently driving well over the speed limit, and not just texting and actively reading news articles while driving over the speed limit, but even engaging in full-on FaceTime calls. In June 2024, Fetterman got into a car accident while speeding on a highway; he crashed into a 62-year-old woman driver, and Gisele, sitting in the backseat, suffered a pulmonary contusion and spinal fractures. Fetterman admitted he’d fallen asleep at the wheel. “It’s a miracle no one died,” the responding police officer said. 

In response to all of these allegations, Fetterman, interviewed by Terris, maintained that he feels like the “best version” of himself and wrote off “disgruntled” former staffers without elaborating on why they might be “disgruntled.”

Overall, I highly recommend reading the very long story in its entirety, because I am really just scratching the surface here. But I thought one particular quote from The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, who interviewed Fetterman several times recently, really puts things into perspective: “He’s struggling. He’s, like, really struggling. And I just think coming off of the Biden thing, we should not be hiding the ball on this sort of stuff.”

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