US Senator John Fetterman is facing the biggest battle of his political career – representing his home state of Pennsylvania without his devoted wife by his side.
With the 6ft 8in Democrat giant weathering reports of declining health and a rift in his marriage, his wife is back home in the Pittsburgh suburbs – conspicuously not wearing her wedding ring.
When the Daily Mail caught up with her this week, Brazilian-born Gisele Barreto Fetterman, 43, batted away questions about the state of their union.
When asked about the missing wedding band, she said: ‘I’m a firefighter, did you know that? If I wore my wedding ring to fight fires, that would be dangerous. That’s why it’s not here.’
In recent years, Gisele has volunteered as a part-time firefighter.
Speculation over the couple’s marriage has intensified since a damning report in New York Magazine cited Fetterman’s former staffers dishing potentially damaging details of his closely guarded health history and erratic behavior.
It also gave excruciating accounts of spats between Fetterman, 55, and his activist wife, who has become something of a political star herself after he successfully ran for the Senate in 2022.
The Daily Mail has also previously revealed that Gisele has been noticeably absent from Washington DC this entire year, with one Senate staffer telling us: ‘I haven’t seen her once.’
Now, we can disclose how and where she’s been spending her time… a four-hour drive from her husband’s DC power base.
The woman who came to America as a seven-year-old undocumented migrant is now seemingly concentrating her energies back in the tough community of Braddock, Pennsylvania, where Fetterman was mayor and the couple have lived since marrying in 2008.
Their family home – that they share with their three children – is a quirky conversion of a former Chevy dealership, sat directly opposite the monstrous Edgar Thomson steel plant which belches smoke from multiple chimneys 24 hours a day and creates an intense noise that dominates the area.
When the Daily Mail caught up with her in the Pittsburgh suburb, she was working at the food bank she runs in the community outside The Hollander Project – ‘a co-working space and business incubator for women entrepreneurs’.
Affable and bubbly, she smiled as we asked how she and her husband were faring amid claims that his behavior has been increasingly erratic.
Fetterman suffered a stroke in May 2022 while running for the Senate and has since used an iPhone to translate incoming questions while at work as he continues to suffer from audio-visual impairment.
The NY mag report detailed how the Democrat has recently appeared despondent at times while acting ‘manic’ and ‘unhinged’ at others. Staffers said they ‘no longer recognized the man they knew’.
It also revealed that after a March 2023 stint for depression at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center near Washington, serious concerns were raised over his lifestyle.
‘He eats fast food multiple times and day… we don’t know if he’s taking his meds,’ his former chief of staff Adam Jentleson wrote to the traumatic brain injury and neuropsychiatry director in a reported urgent letter.
Jentleson told the outlet that he had sent an alarmed email to Fetterman’s doctor, expressing how worried he was and that he feared his boss ‘won’t be with us for much longer’.
Jentleson also claimed the allegedly dazed senator was ‘nearly struck by a car’ and was found ‘wandering’ around the Capitol.
So what does Fetterman’s wife have to say on the issue?
‘I’m a private citizen and I’d rather not say anything about this at all,’ she said, good-naturedly batting away every question – yet continuing to fan the flames of uncertainty by not issuing direct denials.
Although one subject, as we stood in the depressed steel town’s devastated-looking main street, did spark a more positive reaction.
Unbidden, Gisele held up her phone, instantly flicked to a previous story we had published on her, and said: ‘I love this photo of me. Keep using ones like that.’
Dressed in a black top and pants with brown boots, she also spent time outside chatting with passers-by and at one point tended to a colorful garden plot, which featured a large bright mural in the background.
Gisele’s failure to deny any widening gap between her and Fetterman comes in stark contrast to a January 2024 Daily Mail interview during which he branded rumors of a split ‘outrageous’. The senator insisted they were closer than ever.
However, New York Magazine painted a dramatically different picture.
In one alleged incident, a Fetterman staffer sent Gisele a text message saying ‘Everyone here is feeling alarmed’ over his behavior. This was after the sentator had handed over his social media passwords as part of a recovery plan.
Gisele is reported to have replied: ‘[The doctor] had also said that [Fetterman] was fighting to get access of the Twitter account… Please promise me that he’ll never have access.’
‘I told him I don’t want to talk to him until his blood is tested,’ she allegedly added.
Gisele reportedly had tearful conversations with Fetterman as she pleaded with him to reverse his proud support of Israel.
Another staffer also reportedly recalled overhearing Gisele on speakerphone in December 2023 demanding of Fetterman: ‘Who did I marry? Where is the man I married?’
And a more recent blow-up between the couple came after Fetterman took a last-minute trip to Connecticut in March without telling anyone, staffers say.
According to the NY mag report, Gisele and senate staffers had no idea where her husband was or what he was up to. Aides were said to be at a loss for what to tell the mom when she demanded to know why he was missing one of their kids’ birthdays.
‘I took a weekend trip in March to visit the grave site of my friend from grad school who died in 1993 — a trip my staff and family knew about,’ Fetterman said in response to the magazine.
More recently, Fetterman and his wife reportedly fought because she didn’t want to accompany him to Mar-a-Lago to meet Donald Trump after his election victory.
‘It was a whole saga,’ a former staffer said. ‘She wasn’t going to go and they had fights about it.’
To convince her the Mar-a-Lago trip was a good idea, Fetterman reportedly told Gisele it was an opportunity to showcase what a model migrant looked like in a bid to get the then president-elect to soften his views on undocumented immigration. Ultimately, she went.
Fetterman has dismissed the allegations in the magazine that he’s unfit to serve, branding the article a ‘hit piece’.
‘It involved maybe two or three anonymous disgruntled staffers saying just absolute false things,’ he told CNN. ‘I’ve been very front and center about my depression.’
He also denied avoiding taking his medication, adding doctors think he is ‘great’ and that he has been attending regular checkups.
Meanwhile, the imposing presence of Mar-a-Lago in ritzy Palm Beach, Florida, where Fetterman whisked his reluctant wife couldn’t be in more stark contrast to Braddock.
Many tough places are branded hardscrabble, conjuring images of toughness, struggle, grit and determination. For the rust-belt town of Braddock – whose population has slumped from nearly 9,000 in the 1970s to around 1,700 now – the word doesn’t even touch the edges.
Despite a cheerful ‘Welcome to Braddock’ sign, visitors are quickly assailed by a sense of hope being outgunned by despair amid attempts to brighten the place up with giant murals on the walls of deserted buildings and pastel shades on others.
The rusted Edgar Thomson plant, part of US Steel and stretching two miles along the Monongahela River, employs 650 workers while the figure was in the thousands just a generation ago.
It is here, directly opposite the steelworks, that the Fettermans settled in a home they renovated and is the subject of gushing local website pieces.
It is also where Gisele serves as a member of the Rivers Edge Volunteer Fire Department, fulfilling a dream she had since marveling at a new fire truck while a third grader living in Queens, New York.
The couple married two years after Fetterman became mayor. Gisele was later to become Pennsylvania’s Second Lady when her husband served as lieutenant governor between 2019 and 2023.
Their home is ‘an epitome of lavishness… filled with interesting details and architectural elements… a loft-style home with a blend of style and comfort’, according to lifestyle and celebrity website Gigwise.
It continues: ‘Fetterman puts lots of effort into renovating the house as per his requirements and design goals. The house features beautiful floors, steel beams, and big mahogany windows.
‘The interior is eye-catching, with grand chandeliers, high ceilings and elaborate moldings.. a calming retreat that captures the essence of American homes.’
However, that restored home is one of the few beacons in the surrounding hilly streets, where many wood-framed houses appear on the verge of dereliction.
The couple, who previously lived in the back of an old furniture warehouse, first saw the two-story redbrick place in 2013. An old Chevy had to be removed by crane before the nine-month renovation could start.
The second-story loft area, with its heavily industrialized features, is where they’ve been photographed by various local outlets. ‘When we walked in we knew this was going to be our home,’ Gisele told Pittsburgh Magazine.
But there was one crucial addition to the remodel, the mag noted… soundproof windows to combat the roar of the steelworks.