Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was donning “very high” heels when she broke her hip in a nasty fall on marble steps at a World War II battlefield site in Luxembourg last Friday — then ostensibly powered through the pain to pose for a group photo.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas), who helped Pelosi to her feet after the tumble at Grand Ducal Palace, opened up on Tuesday about how the 84-year-old Democrat got injured during the bipartisan trip.
“I was right next to her. She likes to wear high heels — very high. She was on one of her last steps on this marble staircase that didn’t have a railing and she lost her footing and fell to the ground,” McCaul, 62, told reporters.
“I immediately helped pick her up. And we took a picture of that. You can see me holding her up by her hand and then very soon thereafter, a vehicle showed up and took her to the hospital.”
Eagle-eyed observers had previously taken note of Pelosi’s seemingly firm grip on McCaul’s hand in the delegation photo on the stairwell at the palace.
Pelosi had been part of a bipartisan delegation to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge in the tiny Western European country nestled between France, Germany and Belgium.
In the image, she had her left hand over her hip and some speculated that she looked to be masking discomfort.
After that photo was snapped, Pelosi was whisked away from Luxembourg to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, which is near the US Ramstein Air Base in Germany, McCaul confirmed.
Pelosi has since undergone hip replacement surgery, according to her spokesperson.
“She’s 84, but when I talked to her on the phone, she had a lot of energy. Very spunky. She wants to get out of there, she wants to fly back home to the United States,” McCaul added. “Overall, she’s in good spirits.”
The Post reached out to a Pelosi spokesperson for confirmation that she stood up for the photo after breaking her hip.
Due to term limits, McCaul is set to cede his chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), who will take over in the next Congress, which gets sworn in next month.
Pelosi is in her 19th term in the House of Representatives. Despite passing the leadership baton onto House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries over two years ago, she still has pronounced influence within the party.
The San Francisco Democrat is widely speculated to have played a key role in fomenting the pressure campaign against President Biden to drop out of the 2024 race. The two went months without speaking after the mutiny.
More recently, Pelosi reportedly whipped members against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) bid to serve as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, having backed Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) for that role instead.
Pelosi is the fifth oldest member of the lower chamber. Grace Napolitano (D-Calif.) is the oldest at 88.
