I HAVE A FACE THAT people think they can say anything to me," Gisele Barreto Fetterman says, dipping a plastic knife into soft serve at a Burger King near Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. (There are no spoons.) Before she became recognizable as the magnificently browed Brazilian-born five-foot-nine wife of the state's six-foot-eight junior senator, she says mothers who heard her speak Portuguese with her three kids addressed her as if she were the nanny. There were many such cases of mistaken identity-as when a woman thought she was staff at a book signing the couple hosted in 2015. "There were 200 people in my house. I was just overwhelmed, and I snuck into the pantry," Fetterman tells me. "I went to have a glass of wine. This woman came inside and said, 'I just want you to know I saw you take a drink and I'm going to tell Mr. Fetterman. And I said, 'Please don't because I don't want to get fired."" Ten minutes later, Fetterman and her husband went to the front of the room and welcomed their guests. The one who had chastised her was in the front row. Afterward, she says, the woman apologized. They had a glass of wine together.
It's not that Fetterman wanted to embarrass her. It's that she thinks "we have to expect the best out of people, and people will rise to meet those expectations"including owning up to acting like an asshole. Some of this empathy may come from her being aware that hers is not the image people conjure when they think "political spouse." She is a formerly undocumented immigrant, openly uses cannabis to treat her chronic back pain, and, since May, works as a volunteer firefighter. But her ability to calmly disarm people has been an asset to John Fetterman as he ascended from small-town mayor to lieutenant governor to U.S. senator.
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