Trump manager reportedly assaults female reporter and lies about it. Then, a transcript emerged.

Last updated on: March 10, 2016 at 10:02 pm by Nancy French

Trump manager reportedly assaults female reporter and lies about it. Then, a transcript emerged. 2016-03-10T22:02:44-05:00 Nancy French

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Tuesday night, after Trump won Michigan and Mississippi, he gave a press conference. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, must’ve gotten angry at Breitbart’s Michelle Fields when she asked the candidate a rather hard question about affirmative action. Reportedly, he grabbed her and yanked her away from the candidate to prevent her from asking a question.

Here’s how she described it:

Trump acknowledged the question, but before he could answer I was jolted backwards. Someone had grabbed me tightly by the arm and yanked me down. I almost fell to the ground, but was able to maintain my balance. Nonetheless, I was shaken. The Washington Post’s Ben Terris immediately remarked that it was Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who aggressively tried to pull me to the ground. I quickly turned around and saw Lewandowski and Trump exiting the building together. No apology. No explanation for why he did this.

Campaign managers aren’t supposed to try to forcefully throw reporters to the ground, no matter the circumstance. But what made this especially jarring is that there was no hint Trump was done taking questions. No one was pushing him to get away. He seemed to have been happily answering queries from my fellow reporters just a moment before.

That’s a pretty odd thing to happen at a press conference, and she even tweeted out photos of the bruise she received:

I guess these just magically appeared on me @CLewandowski_ @realDonaldTrump. So weird. pic.twitter.com/oD8c4D7tw3

— Michelle Fields (@MichelleFields) March 10, 2016

Plus, her account was corroborated by the Washington Post:

As security parted the masses to give him passage out of the chandelier-lit ballroom, Michelle Fields, a young reporter for Trump-friendly Breitbart News, pressed forward to ask the GOP front-runner a question. I watched as a man with short-cropped hair and a suit grabbed her arm and yanked her out of the way. He was Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s 41-year-old campaign manager. Fields stumbled. Finger-shaped bruises formed on her arm. “I’m just a little spooked,” she said, a tear streaming down her face. “No one has grabbed me like that before.”

How did the Trump campaign respond? They said they didn’t recognize her as Breitbart reporter, but instead mistook “her for an adversarial member of the mainstream media.” (As if it’s just fine to treat journalists from other publications by physical intimidation?) But that’s just the beginning. Soon, they were denying it happened at all.

NEW: Trump campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks responds to allegations campaign manager assaulted Breitbart reporter: pic.twitter.com/LHRMKXzy3K

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) March 10, 2016

David French writes:

The falsehood is clear. The statement says that “no other outlet or reporter witnessed or questioned anything that transpired that evening.” Yet Terris not only witnessed the attack, he wrote about it and talked about it with other journalists. In fact, it is so incandescently obvious that at least one other reporter says that he saw the incident, that it seems far more likely that the Trump campaign is flat-out lying, rather than merely mistaken.

They’ve done much more than just lying about what happened. They also malign the reporter’s character. They accused her of being a fabulist who makes up stories, said she is a person who wants to make the news instead of reporting it, and even mocked her about another incident in which she was a sexual victim. Click through to National Review to see why these accusations are baseless. (Really, you won’t believe it.) But after all this, Politico released an audiotape of the incident, which — you guessed it — confirms Fields’s account:

Fields: “Mr. Trump, you went after the late Scalia for affirmative action, do you — are you still against affirmative action?”

Voice (allegedly Corey Lewandowski): “Excuse me, thank you.”

A few moments later (noise of the room can be heard)…

Terris: “You OK?”

Fields: “Holy sh*t.”

Terris: “Yea he just threw you down.”

Fields: “I can’t believe he just did that that was so hard. Was that Corey?”

Terris: “Yeah, like, what threat were you?”

Fields: “That was insane. You should have felt how hard he grabbed me. That’s insane. I’ve never had anyone do that to me from a campaign.”

Terris: “Can I put that in my story?”

Fields: “Yeah, go for it — that was really awful. That’s so unprofessional.”

Terris: “He really just almost threw you down on the ground.”

Fields: “He literally went like this and was grabbing me down. I don’t even what to do [about] what he just did to me. Oh my God, that really spooked me that someone would do that.”

French concludes:

The Trump campaign’s response has been beyond shameful. When faced with a corroborated, credible report of violence, its response should be to launch an immediate internal investigation and treat the alleged victim with respect. Instead, it responded with falsehoods and character assassination. But from the Trump organization would we expect anything less?

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