EXCLUSIVE: Christine Pelosi Rips Boutique Owner After Her Own Teen Daughter & Friends Are Caught Shoplifting
Christine Pelosi, Daughter of Nancy Pelosi, Plays Victim After Her Own Teen Daughter and Friend's Are Caught Stealing from a store in St. Helena, CA -- the Napa Valley hamlet, where Nancy owns a home.
Tiffany Montelli was enjoying a rare moment of relaxation at home with her husband and youngest daughter on Thursday December 22nd when she learned that a group of teenage girls had stolen a shirt from her clothing boutique, ‘Tiffany and Kids,’ which sells quality and affordable women’s and children’s attire in downtown St. Helena, CA — a small, charming town in the Napa Valley. What Tiffany Montelli didn’t know was that one of the shop lifters was the granddaughter of the soon to be ex-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Just a month before — around Thanksgiving — Montelli had nearly 600 dollars worth of merchandise stolen from her boutique. Unfortunately, Montelli’s store security cameras failed to record it.
“I did not realize my cloud storage was full,” recalls Montelli. “I cried hard that day. The theft took place on ‘Small Business Saturday.’ “The one day in the world people should support small businesses, someone was out there stealing from them,” says Montelli.
Montelli used her savings and her husband’s to open her boutique in September of 2019. Six months later she nearly lost her business when she was forced to close due to the COVID lockdowns. While Montelli has persevered, her business still isn’t profitable.
“I want to be successful,” Montelli says. “I want to build something for my daughters to be proud of. I want to show them they can also do whatever they set their minds and hearts too, and that hard works pays off.”
Montelli says that after the November theft she “got her cameras updated” with “bigger cloud storage.” “I swore to myself the next person who stole from me would be caught.”
On December 22nd Montelli’s security cameras did capture the next people who stole from her: three teenage girls entering the fitting room together with a white shirt and a shopping bag and exiting with a shopping bag and without a shirt.
(The three teens captured entering the fitting room with the white shirt held in the second teen’s hand)
After the girls paid for two bralettes and left the store, Montelli’s employee went into the fitting room to clear it out and discovered a tag without the shirt. The employee then notified Tiffany Montelli.
Montelli reviewed the security footage and sent the video of the three teenage girls to her 12 year old daughter, 15 year old niece, and Lisa Montelli, Tiffany’s mother in law, a 20 plus year employee of the St. Helena primary school. St. Helena is a small town with approximately 6,000 residents and Montelli was hopeful that one of them would recognize the girls if they were locals. But none of them had ever seen the girls before.
Lisa Montelli was walking past Steve’s Hardware store at the north end of Main Street when she watched the footage of the teens on her phone. She looked up and — lo and behold — saw the three girls from the security footage coming out.
“Can you three go back to Tiffany’s,” Lisa says she asked the girls. “I think you forgot to pay for a shirt you have.”
Lisa says one of the girls then called out across the street to her mother. “Come back mom, this lady is accusing us of shoplifting.” Lisa didn’t know it but the mother was Christine Pelosi, the daughter of Nancy Pelosi.
After Lisa showed Pelosi the security footage, Pelosi and the teenage girls reluctantly accompanied Lisa Montelli back towards the boutique at the south end of town. Lisa says “that’s when the longest five minute walk of my life began.” “[Pelosi] continued to get louder and louder so people would stare at me,” recalls Lisa.
Pelosi was adamant that the girls hadn’t stolen anything. “These girls all have money,” “They all have credit cards,” and “As you can see by the bags they have been shopping and paid for everything.” These are a few of the points Lisa Montelli recalls Pelosi citing as evidence that the girls couldn’t possibly be guilty of any wrong doing. Pelosi is an attorney, which she made clear to Lisa along the way.
Lisa says she told Pelosi that she “would apologize profusely to the girls if [she] was wrong.” Pelosi then told Lisa, “you’ll do more than apologize.” While Pelosi asked Lisa Montelli for her name, Lisa still had no idea that the woman yelling at her was Christine Pelosi, daughter of Nancy Pelosi.
Nor did Tiffany Montelli, the boutique owner, know the identity of the woman. Montelli says she came in through the back entrance of the store to find a woman — Christine Pelosi — “yelling at [her] employee to search [the girls’] shopping bags.” “She was screaming saying things like ‘how dare we accuse her girls,’” recalls Montelli. Pelosi even told Montelli that she had “ruined [her] Christmas,” and reiterated that she was “an attorney” and was “not happy about this.”
When Sgt. Peterson, a St. Helena Police Officer, arrived on the scene, Christine triumphantly told the officer that the girls' bags had been searched and contained items they had bought and the accompanying receipts.
That’s when the boutique employee spoke up and pointed out that one of the two bralettes was missing from the bag. Montelli says that the attorney Pelosi then claimed that it was because one of the girls was wearing it.
The three accused teenage shoplifters then left the boutique. “They asked [Christine Pelosi] if they could go back to Steve’s Hardware to buy a gift,” recalls Montelli.
Shortly after, the three girls returned to the store, accompanied by Officer Lopez, a second police officer, who was carrying a small brown paper bag. “They had scared looks on their faces,” says Montelli. Lopez told them he had found the bag outside of the Hardware store. Tiffany Montelli looked inside the bag and found the second bralette, which Pelosi had falsely claimed one of the girls had been wearing, and the stolen white shirt folded nicely at the bottom of the bag.
(Tiffany Montelli holds up the stolen white shirt from the bag Officer Lopez retrieved from near Steve’s Hardware. Christine Pelosi watches from behind her black mask.)
Montelli declined pressing charges.“I wanted to,” Montelli says, “but since I had already been accused of ruining a family’s Christmas and got my merchandise back, I felt like maybe I should give them a break.” It was only after on of the Officers took down their names for a police report that Montelli learned that the irate mother was Christine Pelosi and one of the teenage girls her daughter.
Christine Pelosi never apologized to Tiffany Montelli. “Well now you have your shirt back so you can sell it and not be out of the $65 dollars,” Montelli recalls Pelosi saying dismissively before she left.
“A $65 shirt is the monthly tuition for just one ballet class for one of my daughters,” says Montelli. "To many $65 means nothing but to my family it's a ballet class. To lose $65 to theft is literally taking money out of my pocket.”
When Tiffany Montelli explained to her oldest daughter that “teenage girls can make bad judgment calls,” the twelve year old responded, “Mom, that’s not a bad judgement call, that’s just wrong. That’s stealing.”
Christine Pelosi has been reported as a potential successor to her mother Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat when she retires. On her ‘Christine Pelosi for DNC’ webpage she claims that “As a mom, I think parenthood is an implicit promise to make the world more safe, free and equal for our children.”