Gisele Barreto Fetterman spoke candidly about her life in an interview about her new book on WHYY in Philadelphia on Friday. She talked about her habit of crying, a conversation about immigration with President Donald Trump, being mistaken for “the help,” — and she defended her husband, who has become a polarizing force in Washington.

Barreto Fetterman, the wife of Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., was already crying before Mary Moss-Coane, host of “The Connection,” had a chance to ask the first question. She started crying again just a few minutes later — and said she also cried on the train to Philly.

Why? She’s a self-proclaimed “softie.”

“I’ve always been that way,” she said. “I think some people are just that way.”

And that softness is in line with the title of her book: "Radical Tenderness: The Value of Vulnerability in an Often Unkind World."

“I’m able to approach others with tenderness because I do not flatten my own emotional experiences. I let in hurt, sadness and joy in equal measure,” Moss-Coane read aloud on air from Barreto Fetterman’s book. “Yet this emotional range is discouraged in society that places more value on traditionally masculine traits rather than those perceived as feminine.”

Here’s some of what Barreto Fetterman divulged in the interview, which included anecdotes from her 240-page book, which published on July 8 and is part-memoir, part-manifesto.

—On crying

“I really, really care about everything,” said Barreto Fetterman, a firefighter who runs a “free store” in Braddock, Allegheny County.

As she started to cry, her voice shaking, she told Mary Moss-Coane: “This is very normal.”

“We are born crying, and along the way we are told to stop,” she added. “And I think I never stopped.”

She said she isn’t ashamed of it, and believes other criers should embrace who they are, and let it out more.

—On being an undocumented immigrant as a child

Barreto Fetterman immigrated to Queens with her family at age 7 in December 1989 to escape what she called normalized violence in Brazil. She overstayed her visa and became undocumented before getting her green card in 2004 and becoming a citizen in 2009.

The hardest part of being an undocumented child was knowing she was doing something wrong while her family was doing “everything right,” she said. She got good grades at school, they paid their taxes, and volunteered. Her mom worked multiple jobs as a cleaner, coat check, server, and caterer.

She had to be careful not to be too active and risk injury because they didn’t have health insurance. She was terrified when there was an unexpected knock at the door or if a police car passed by, but her mom had a positive attitude and made everything a game with each day full of “adventures and hurdles that we had to overcome to get to the next level,” she said.

She was taught not to draw attention to herself — which she said lines up with her personality because she doesn’t like attention to this day, whether by way of birthday parties or the media.

Her first memory of America? “The cold.”

—On meeting with President Donald Trump

Barreto Fetterman said with Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, “every single day is a heartbreak.”

She said immigrants helped keep businesses open during the COVID-19 pandemic, pick food we eat every day, and overall “contribute so much to society.”

“But not only that, like they’re just humans, and that’s enough, right? I think contributing is great, but just wanting a better life for your family is enough,” she added.

But she said that in order to get through the rest of Trump’s administration, “we have to have conversations with each other.”

That’s why she decided to meet with the president with her husband at Mar-a-Lago. It was the first time a sitting Democratic senator met with him at the Palm Beach resort.

Barreto Fetterman said she went to tell her story and advocate for other undocumented immigrants who came to the country as a child — “not to be naive to think I’m going to change his mind, but I should at least try.”

She said she told Trump about “the contributions of dreamers” and that undocumented families “are not numbers,” but “real people.”

“And in that meeting, about dreamers, he said he agrees,” she said. “He said that dreamers are American. He said many of them don’t even speak their native language.”

So how does she make sense of that conversation with his policies? Moss-Coane asked.

“I don’t think there is sense to be made,” Barreto Fetterman responded. “I think this is what we have to get through until it changes. And you know, the more people that are celebrating and giving him credit for the things he’s saying and doing, it’s just empowering him to continue to do more of that.”

Sen. Fetterman recently defended Trump’s ICE. He slammed calls to abolish the agency and said it “performs an important role” and he supports the agents “doing their job.” He said he also supports amnesty “for the hardworking, otherwise law-abiding migrant workers” but wants ICE to “round up and deport the criminals.”

—On being mistaken as ‘the help’

Barreto Fetterman said she’s been mistaken as “the help” on multiple occasions, and she has tried to confront those situations in a gentle and playful way, she said.

She shared that in one instance, she was hosting a party as the second lady of Pennsylvania and was mistaken by someone as a server.

After she took a glass of wine from her pantry, a woman told her she “saw what she did” and would tell Fetterman, who was lieutenant governor at the time. Barreto Fetterman said she usually just wouldn’t have said anything or cried, but her glass of wine made her “a little spicy,” so she said “please don’t tell him, I don’t want to get fired,” knowing the guest would soon learn who she really is when they welcomed the guests into their home.

The woman felt horrible, and Barreto Fetterman drank wine with her and they had a heart-to-heart.

—On Fetterman’s stroke and depression

Barreto Fetterman looked back on when she spotted her husband’s stroke during his senatorial campaign by noticing his mouth momentarily droop. She said nothing else seemed wrong and she successfully encouraged him to go to the hospital even though he insisted that everything was fine.

“His mouth just moved differently for a second. It didn’t stay in that position,” she said. “His speech wasn’t affected, things you expect of a stroke. He had no physical pain. … he’s saying, ‘I’m fine, she’s crazy’.”

Moss-Coane asked Barreto Fetterman about the news stories about her husband in recent months in which previous staffers expressed concern about his health, citing outbursts and neglecting to follow his doctor’s orders.

Barreto Fetterman defended her husband and said his mental health is “great,” and that he is doing everything his doctors tell him to do.

“Once you have the stigma of mental health, it will follow you,” she said, citing when he checked himself in to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in February 2023.

Barreto Fetterman resisted accusations that Fetterman doesn’t like his job as a U.S. senator after he told reporters he wants “to go home” as voting for Trump’s budget bill dragged on, lamenting that he missed his “entire trip to the beach.”

She said “sometimes you get locked in there and they don’t let you leave,” and “the one thing he looks forward to in his life is going to the Shore with the kids once a year,” for a four-day “very humble” vacation at the Jersey Shore.

“It’s not that at all,” she said. “I think there’s a lot of things he wished worked differently there.”

She emphasized that she and her husband are their own people, and that while she tries not to “hate” anything, she “dislikes” politics “very deeply.”

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