Politics

Reporter Describes Incident Involving Trump Campaign Manager: ‘I Was Shaken’

By Mark Joyella 

The reporter who says she was nearly pulled to the ground by Corey Lewandowski, campaign manager for Donald Trump, has written a story detailing the incident. Writing at Breitbart, Michelle Fields says the encounter left her “shaken,” and she has so far received “no apology, no explanation.”

Fields, a Breitbart reporter who is a former Fox News contributor and who appears on the Fox News Channel show Cashin’ In, says she had not been called on during Trump’s news conference in Florida Tuesday evening. She caught up with the Republican frontrunner as he was leaving:

I asked him about his view on an aspect of affirmative action.

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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.

Fields says a Washington Post reporter identified the person who had grabbed her as Lewandowski:

Even if Trump was done taking questions, Lewandowski would be out of line. 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.

A witness, Washington Post reporter Ben Terris, describes what he saw:

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.’

The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove reports Lewandowski admitted to grabbing Fields. Citing sources, Grove says Lewandowski explained to Breitbart Washington political editor Matthew Boyle “that he and Fields had never met before and that he didn’t recognize her as a Breitbart reporter, instead mistaking her for an adversarial member of the mainstream media.”

UPDATE: 2:10 p.m. ET: In a statement to ABC News, the Trump campaign denies the incident:

After that response, Fields tweeted this:

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