With his wife away in Washington DC, Paul Pelosi woke up in the early hours of the morning to find an intruder in their San Francisco home making a bone-chilling demand.
"Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?" David DePape reportedly shouted as he sought out the speaker of the US House of Representatives.
The 42-year-old entered the property last Friday with at least one hammer, carrying a backpack containing a roll of tape, white rope, rubber and cloth gloves, and zip ties, according to the FBI.
Mr DePape later told local police he wanted to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage in order to have a political discussion.
He then explained that if she told the "truth" he planned to let her go.
But if she "lied", he said, he intended to break her kneecaps so she would have to be wheeled into US Congress as a warning to other US Democrats.
Mr Pelosi likely saved his own life by feigning a trip to the bathroom, where his mobile phone was charging.
From there, he dialled emergency services and held the line, hoping the operator would overhear his conversation with Mr DePape and realise what was happening.
The dispatcher's "intuition" told her something was terribly wrong, according to San Francisco authorities, and she sent police to the Pelosi home.
Officers arrived within 10 minutes and found Mr Pelosi and Mr DePape in a violent struggle over a hammer, authorities later relayed.
It was then that Mr DePape allegedly grabbed back his weapon and "violently assaulted" the 82-year-old man.
"Based on our investigation at this point … this was not a random act," San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott told reporters.
"This was intentional."
Mr Pelosi was discharged from hospital on Thursday, six days after the attack, but his wife has flagged it will be a long road to recovery.
"Paul remains under doctors' care as he continues to progress on a long recovery process and convalescence. He is now home," Ms Pelosi said.
While the attack came as a shock to Ms Pelosi's colleagues in Congress, for some, it was not a surprise.
A steadily increasing drumbeat of threats against prominent Americans has left senators, members of congress and even local school board officials fearing for their lives.
And many are now left to wonder: If the woman who is second in line to the presidency cannot keep intruders out of her home, what hope is there for anyone else?
How Nancy Pelosi became a political lightning rod
Even before she took over as Democratic speaker of the house during the tail end of Donald Trump's presidency, Nancy Pelosi was a target for criticism from the political right.
As a left-leaning politician from liberal San Francisco who made history by becoming the first woman elected to be house speaker, she was always going to draw attention.
But some conservative pundits went further, painting Ms Pelosi as a "loopy liberal", hell-bent on destroying the joint.
"It's almost surprising that something like this hasn't happened sooner," Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, said of the attack on Mr Pelosi.
"Because of the ways that the right tends to dehumanise and vilify elected officials on the left, particularly Nancy Pelosi or [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]."
One of the most powerful women in US politics, Ms Pelosi has frequently featured in Republican attack ads, including one where she appeared as "Darth Nancy" and another that showed her face framed by the barrel of a gun.
According to Politico, in 2010 alone, she starred in $US75 million ($116 million) worth of Republican-funded ads that helped sway the midterm elections that year and deliver them control of the house.
Ms Pelosi developed a pretty thick skin, telling reporters in 2010: "I view [the attacks] as a highest compliment, that they want to take us down."
When Mr Trump arrived on the political scene, his Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters directed much of their ire at his opponent for the presidency, Hillary Clinton.
But they had plenty left for the woman who would become one of his most prominent critics.
'Where are you Nancy? We're looking for you'
The 45th president of the United States took to calling Nancy Pelosi "crazy Nancy" — a nickname gleefully adopted by his supporters and other Republicans in Congress.
A CNN investigation found Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly indicated her support for violent threats against the speaker, including the suggestion "a bullet to the head would be quicker" to remove her from office.
For the most part, these threats did not seem to rattle Ms Pelosi or the Democrats more broadly.
But in the days following the 2020 election, when Mr Trump lost power, that rhetoric kicked up a notch.
Disgruntled vandals targeted the speaker's home in early January 2021, smearing fake blood on the garage door and leaving a severed pig's head on the pavement.
Days later, Secret Service agents discovered a Parler account making violent threats towards politicians, and listing Ms Pelosi among its "enemies".
She was not alerted to the threats until the evening of January 6, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
By that time, Mr Trump's supporters had mounted an insurrection on the Capitol.
Driven by the former president's false narrative that the election had been "stolen" and the certification of results must be stopped, they went in search of those who stood in their way, including Mr Trump's vice-president Mike Pence.
As hordes of angry protesters donning paramilitary gear and MAGA merchandise climbed the walls and entered the building, Ms Pelosi was among those who were quickly escorted from the premises.
Rioters stalked the halls of the Capitol for their targets, taunting: "Where are you, Nancy? We're looking for you …" and: "Yeah, we're coming, b****."
Several managed to break into the speaker's office, posing for photos at her desk, leaving crude notes and damaging property while her staff hid in a nearby conference room.
Another who entered the House of Representatives made off with the speaker's lectern.
From her safe place, she spoke with the outgoing vice-president, who was hiding out at a separate secret location as rioters chanted, "Hang Mike Pence," and erected gallows outside the Capitol.
A member of the far-right Oath Keepers group was accused of exchanging messages about "hoping to see Nancy's head rolling down the front steps", while two women boasted about how they were "looking for Nancy to shoot her in her friggin' brain, but we didn't find her".
Reflecting on the havoc being wrought that day, Ms Pelosi told then acting attorney-general Jeffrey Rosen: "They're obviously ransacking our offices; that's nothing."
"The concern we have is about personal safety — it just transcends everything," she said.
In a nation where four presidents have been assassinated, and many more have survived attempts on their lives, the danger to politicians has always loomed large in America.
But while public figures have lived with the possibility of violence for centuries, experts say political tensions have steadily increased in recent decades.
The volatile state of American political rhetoric
At the SNF Agora Institute, Dr Mason studies partisanship, identity and polarisation, and how political extremism rooted in regular people is becoming increasingly widespread in the United States.
Since 2017, she has measured the extent to which people vilify those in other political parties, for example calling them "evil", dehumanising them or labelling them a threat to the American way of life.
Dr Mason identified the 1960s as a turning point when more Americans began to make their political beliefs central to their personal identities.
"That shift … made the partisan divide much more a cultural and identity-based competition, rather than, 'Which party has the best tax policy?'" she said.
Instead of voting based on a rational assessment of their best interests, Dr Mason said some Americans were "thinking about, 'I need to win. I just need to make sure that we win because those people are different in every possible way.'"
In recent years, partisan differences have become even more pronounced and potentially dangerous.
Threats against members of Congress investigated by US Capitol Police increased by 144 per cent between 2017 and 2021, according to data obtained by Axios.
And Democrats are not the only victims of politically motivated attacks.
Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, who sits on the committee investigating the January 6 riots, said a death threat was mailed to his wife earlier this year.
"This threat that came in, it was mailed to my house. We got it a couple of days ago, and it threatens to execute me, as well as my wife and five-month-old child," he told ABC America.
Mr Kinzinger blamed the shifting mood on Mr Trump's debunked claim that he won the 2020 election and a Democrat-led conspiracy forced him from office.
"There's violence in the future, I'm going to tell you. And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can't expect any differently," Mr Kinzinger said.
Republican senator Ted Cruz, who says he receives an overwhelming number of threats, pays for private security guards.
And in 2017, Republican House Minority Whip Steve Scalise was shot by an anti-Trump domestic terrorist while playing baseball with friends.
Seth Jones, a senior vice-president and director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said there were more than 1,000 cases of terrorist attacks within the US last year.
"We're seeing threats to the military, the police and government officials — including, in this case, Nancy Pelosi and certainly her husband," he said.
"We are seeing them from both the violent far right and the violent far left of the US political spectrum, so from both sides.
"It is not surprising to see government officials targeted. It's the single-biggest category from last year."
But women and people of colour from both parties appear to be on the receiving end of the most virulent hate.
Bulletproof vests and secret sleeping locations
Studies show that as more women run for office around the world, violence and threats against them also increase.
But while government officials account for 16 per cent of the targets of political violence against women around the world, in the US it is closer to 25 per cent.
Republican senator Susan Collins had a window at her home smashed last month, while Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal said a man armed with a semiautomatic weapon often stood outside her home shouting profanities.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rising star of the Democratic party, pays for 24-hour security protection and sleeps at different locations to keep herself safe, according to the New York Times.
"This is not a place designed to protect women. It's not a place to protect LGBT people," she said after she was sexually harassed on the steps of the Capitol building in July.
"Certain people will be safe, but not all of us will be safe. Do not trust that things are OK."
Since August, the house sergeant-at-arms' office has been offering up to $US10,000 ($15,787) to cover the cost of installing security systems at the homes of members of congress.
But threats are rippling beyond federal politics. Judges, election workers and local office holders are also on the receiving end of violence and harassment.
"Somebody is going to die," Democratic congresswoman Debbie Dingell told Axios.
"I know school board members that are wearing bulletproof vests to meetings now."
The looming potential for more violence
With the US midterm election days away, fears are mounting that more politically motivated violence could be just around the corner.
The FBI, Department of Homeland Security and US Capitol Police have issued a heightened threat advisory, warning of potential attacks on political candidates during or after the vote.
Their biggest concern is that people invested in Mr Trump's false narrative about the 2020 election will lash out if they believe their candidate was the rightful winner of their race.
Dr Mason said democracy required a shared reality and people could not trust electoral politics "if they have opposite views of what is happening in the country".
"[Misinformation] undermines democracy on a basic level because it prevents regular citizens from even having conversations with one another about politics because what they perceive as real is completely different," she said.
Mr Jones said while there was the possibility of violence around polling stations and against politicians, his leading concern was that protests could spiral into violence.
"It's not a question that an individual will plot an attack against a US politician or even against the polling station," he said.
"My bigger worry based on recent events … has been the larger demonstrations, generally in urban areas, with protesters and counter-protesters escalating into violence."
