The former chief of staff of Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was so alarmed with the erratic behavior of his ex-bass last year that he wrote a long letter to his doctor warning that the senator was beyond control and that his mental health problems could cost him his life.
“I fear that if John remains on his current trajectory, he will not be with us longer,” wrote Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff, wrote Mr. Fetterman on May 20 at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
The behavior of Mr. Fetterman, according to the former collaborators who are always linked to his decreasing circle, is still sometimes a cause of concern. Other former members of his staff, speaking under the guise of anonymity, reports that their colleagues were sometimes afraid of being in the presence of the senator, if he was in a amplified mood.
They have also long been warned of never entering a car if Mr. Fetterman is driving Due to its dangerous driving habits. His volatile and worrying behavior, that aid noticed last yearHas increased only since the elections, people who have spent time had spent with him. This coincided with a period when his policy has become more conservative, because he looked at his original state of Pennsylvania swinging for Mr. Trump.
“He does not see his doctors,” wrote Mr. Jentleson last year to the medical director who supervised his hospitalization in 2023 for mental health problems. “I don’t know when he saw a cardiologist for the last time, but I don’t think he saw one since his release. He has long ordered us to stop putting on regular drops with Dr. Monahan according to his schedule, despite the fact that he accepted those in the plan. ” Dr. Brian P. Monahan is The Doctor Navy which served for almost 15 years as a doctor on site at the Capitol.
The letter from Mr. Jentleson, obtained by the New York Times, was Reported for the first time by New York magazine.
Mr. Fetterman said in a statement that “my doctors and my family said I am doing very well”. He described the article in New York magazine a “successful song” and suggested that Mr. Jentleson and the author of the article, Ben Terris, were “best friends” with a joint to grind, and that they “come from anonymous and unhappy employees with lies or half-truths”.
(Mr. Terris revealed in his article that Mr. Jentleson is a personal friend.)
A spokesperson for Mr. Fetterman also raised questions Friday about Mr. Jentleson’s motivations to make the public a deeply personal letter, given the stigma that already exists around mental health problems in men.
Mr. Jentleson refused to answer.
Mr. Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s first mandate senator who had an almost deadly stroke during his campaign, spent six weeks in Walter Reed in 2023 Treaty for clinical depression. When he was released, Mr. Fetterman seemed to have turned a corner. He began to adapt to his life in the Senate, to mix him with journalists and colleagues in the corridors, and considered him a unique responsibility to talk about mental health problems.
“It’s a burden, but a privilege also talk about it”, ” He said to the New York Times in an interview in 2023. “It is also an opportunity to be very bipartite. Red or blue, if you suffer from depression, get help, please. Never injure yourself, never leave a plan of this. ”
Hearing treatment problems associated with his stroke also seemed to decrease, and Mr. Fetterman began to converse with people casually with people without having to count on audio transcription.
As he adapted to life as a senator, Mr. Fetterman has also become more conservative, mainly on Israel, but also on a range of other questions. The senator was the first Democrat to meet Mr. Trump in his field of Mar-A-Lago after the elections and seemed to think that finding common ground was politically informed at a time when his condition was sworn further to the right.
Avide Fox News Watcher, Mr. Fetterman even seriously planned to vote to confirm the defense secretary Pete Hegseth, a former host of the weekend on “Fox & Friends”, according to a former assistant. The vote would have reported a green light to a person named from the cabinet who was faced with charges of excessive alcohol consumption and reducing women who made Republican senators difficult to get behind him.
It is not clear for all those who worked closely with him that Mr. Fetterman’s political transformation, or his current challenges, is directly linked to the mental health crisis that sent him to the hospital for the first time two years ago. But in his letter, Mr. Jentleson describes an unstable behavior which, according to him, could be the result of the senator’s failure to follow the medical plan, including taking prescription drugs, then described by his doctors.
“John expelled all those who were supposed to help keep him on his recovery plan,” wrote Mr. Jentleson in the letter to Dr David Williamson, medical director of the neuropsychiatry unit / brain trauma from Brain Buth to Walter Reed. “We do not know if he takes his medication, and his behavior frequently suggests that he is not.”
He said in the letter that people around Mr. Fetterman have often witnessed the “warning signs” of which his doctor had warned the monologues in a painfully, awkwardly obvious way for everyone in the room. »»
He said that Mr. Fetterman had spent most of his time scrolling his phone and formulating tweets, and that things with his wife, Gisele, were “tense”.
“He adopts risky behavior. He led to recklessly. He also recently bought a firearm,” wrote Mr. Jentleson, noting that the purchase of a firearm was a warning sign that he had been ordered to present himself to a health professional.
Gisele Fetterman, in a statement to New York magazine, challenged the allegations of Mr. Jentleson’s letter, accusing her of lying about her husband’s state.
In recent months, Ms. Fetterman has presented a united front with her husband. She accompanied her during his visit to Mar-A-Lago after the electionsAnd at a meeting in Israel last month with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
However, many members of his staff remain worried about working for Mr. Fetterman, whose mood can change considerably from day to day. His conduct remains a particularly worrying area.
The senator has long been known as a reckless driver, sometimes traveling more than 70 miles per hour in an area of 30 miles per hour. Last year, he and his wife, as well as a 62 -year -old woman, were hospitalized after ending the woman’s car on the commemorative road Eisenhower in western Maryland.
Mr. Fetterman driven far above the displayed speed limit of 70 miles per hour, according to the police report. Pennsylvania Records said that Mr. Fetterman had at least two previous driving offenses in the state he traveled more than 20 miles per hour above the speed limit.