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An Indianapolis woman faces prison time for threatening to kill U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace and blow up her office, South Carolina’s 1st District congresswoman told reporters Tuesday.
A spokesperson for Mace shared a Jan. 14 news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Indiana which said Shayla Addison, 28, had been charged with two counts of influencing a federal official by threat.
Addison has agreed to plead guilty, according to court records.
Prosecutors accuse Addison of sending threatening messages last January to a representative’s campaign phone number and email and posting additional threats to social media, according to the release.
It did not identify the representative. A spokesperson for Mace shared screenshots of messages that matched quotes in the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s release.
According to the release, the threatening text messages included “we’ll kill you” and “tread lightly,” and an email threatened to “kill you and blow that whole building up.”
William Dazey Jr., who is listed as Addison’s attorney, did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment.
According to a plea agreement, the government agreed to recommend a sentence on the “low end” of the range the court calculated, after reviewing all of the evidence, in exchange for Addison’s guilty plea.
Mace, one of five Republicans running for governor, told reporters Tuesday that she’s faced an uptick in death threats in the last year and a half and, as a result, was afraid to go to the grocery store or get out of a car.
“I basically live in hiding,” she said.
To explain that uptick, she blamed political rhetoric that encourages violence.
“I also think that it’s because I am a conservative woman, and I do speak out about women’s issues, particularly on the transgender stuff,” she said.
Last April, while addressing the Greenville County GOP convention, Mace said she was among the targets of a Pennsylvania man who had been charged the week before with threatening to kill President Donald Trump and other officials.
Mace told the crowd that U.S. Capitol Police had called to inform her that the suspect, Shawn Monper, had threatened to kill her in an online post in January 2025. Monper, who pleaded not guilty last May, remains in jail. Pretrial motions are scheduled for next month.
Fox News was the first to report, citing an unnamed source, that Monper had posted threats against Mace specifically. She then told reporters at the convention before taking the stage to address the crowd. U.S. Capitol Police declined to comment.
A month later, the State Law Enforcement Division charged a 19-year-old transgender woman with threatening Mace by posting to X: “I’m going to assassinate (redacted) with a gun and I’m being 100% dead a–.” It was posted days after the congresswoman’s contentious exchange with a transgender student at the University of South Carolina went viral.
SLED redacted the victim’s name, but Mace identified herself.
The then-19-year-old Greenville resident, who SLED says admitted to making the post, has been in the Greenville County jail since May and was denied bond for a third time in December.
House Ethics review
Mace’s news conference came days after the bipartisan House Ethics Committee released a short statement about a review of the congresswoman, without giving any specifics whatsoever.
According to the Friday release, the committee received a referral about Mace from the Office of Congressional Conduct, an independent ethics watchdog, in December. The ethics committee plans to announce a “course of action” by March 2.
The release emphasized that its announcement “does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred.”
When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Mace referred the SC Daily Gazette to a letter posted online in December in which an attorney for Mace criticized the Office of Congressional Conduct.
The office had made claims about Mace’s “lodging expenses and reimbursement practices,” according to the letter. The letter said those claims were based on “unverified assertions and materials that may have originated from, or been influenced by, Rep. Mace’s former fiancé.”
In a fiery House floor speech in February, Mace accused four men, including her former fiancé Patrick Bryant, of sexually assaulting women as well as underage girls and secretly recording the abuse. Mace, who broke up with Bryant in late 2023, said she realized while looking through his phone that she was one of the victims. All four men have repeatedly and vehemently denied the allegations.
Lawsuits and counter-lawsuits followed.
In late November, Judge Donald Hocker issued a sweeping gag order barring Bryant, Mace, and others involved in the litigation from speaking or posting about one another or the lawsuits. The order was put in the public court record on Dec. 9, a week before Mace’s lawyer issued a response to the Office of Congressional Conduct on her behalf.
When reached by the SC Daily Gazette on Tuesday, Bryant declined to comment, citing the gag order.
This story was originally produced by SC Daily Gazette, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Indiana Capital Chronicle, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
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