A Texas real estate agent who bragged after Jan. 6 that as a blonde white woman she would not be going to jail for joining in the assault on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob was sentenced Thursday to two months of incarceration.
It was one of the harshest penalties imposed to date on a participant in events at the Capitol who was found guilty only of a petty offense.
“For better or worse, you’ve become one of the faces of January 6,” U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper of Washington, D.C., told Jenna Ryan, 50. She gained national attention by defending her conduct at the Capitol in media interviews and on Twitter. Because of that notoriety, Cooper said, people would look to her sentence as evidence of “how our country responded to what happened.”
He continued, “I think the sentence should tell them that we take it seriously, that it was an assault on our democracy … and that it should never happen again.”
In sentencing Ryan to 60 days in custody, he cited her apparent lack of remorse for her conduct, as well as her decision to join the mob, not directly from President Donald Trump’s rally that morning but after going back to her hotel and seeing television footage of a mob besieging the Capitol.
Ryan pleaded guilty in August to one count of parading, demonstrating or picketing in the Capitol.
“You’ve been very upfront that you feel no sense of shame or guilt,” Cooper said. “You suggested antifa was somehow involved. And perhaps most famously,
you said that because you had blonde hair and white skin, you wouldn’t be going to jail.”
He was referring to a tweet Ryan posted in March saying, “Sorry I have blonde hair white skin a great job a great future and I’m not going to jail … I did nothing wrong.”...
