On Sunday morning, Michelle Fields dropped by CNN for her first national interview since prosecutors in Florida announced they wouldn’t prosecute Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski for grabbing her at a Trump press conference. Incredibly, the host thought it would be a good idea to ask Fields if she would apologize to Lewandowski.
The former Breitbart News reporter appeared on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” to discuss the case. Raw Story got a clip.
Fields told host Brian Stelter that she never wanted to “blow this up” and go to the police. She had been assured by her editor at Breitbart that Lewandowski would apologize. However, it doesn’t appear that said apology ever came. Lewandowski says that he called Fields after reading about the incident on her husband’s Twitter feed. However, we have to take that with a grain of salt, since Lewandowski is now on record as saying that an apology would be “a little unrealistic.”
Fields added that while she’d been bombarded with requests for interviews, she turned them all down because “I didn’t want this to become a story.” However, she said, the Trump camp forced her hand when it started trolling her about the incident. Campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson wondered loudly why Fields hadn’t gone to the police, and Trump himself suggested Fields made the whole thing up. This left her with no choice but to “get someone objective into the situation” and document what happened to her.
When Stelter asked Fields if she was planning to sue Lewandowski or the Trump campaign for defamation, Fields refused to rule it out. She does, however, believe that the Trump campaign defamed her in an attempt to make her look like the villain, and “I think it shows malice.”
However, a lawsuit is pretty low on her priority list at this point. She was forced to move out of her Washington-area apartment after Fox News and Buzzfeed forgot to redact her address and phone number from Lewandowski’s police report. Both outlets removed the unredacted report after Fields reached out to them, but the damage had already been done; she had already received numerous threats.
Stelter then dropped a bombshell. He mentioned that a number of Trump supporters thought Fields should apologize to Lewandowski “for dragging him through this.” Fields called such a suggestion “laughable,” considering that it was Lewandowski who grabbed her and defamed her. However, she seems to have resigned herself to the likelihood that Lewandowski won’t be man enough to apologize.
Fields handled this far better than most of us would have. If a radio or television host asked me if I was even thinking about apologizing to someone who assaulted me, I would have tossed my mic off and walked out right then. That question was grossly insensitive, at best. It is simply beyond belief that Stelter even thought this was a good idea.
Sadly, though, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a CNN host behave in a staggeringly dense manner with a victim. Back in 2014, Don Lemon caught well-deserved hell for suggesting that one of Bill Cosby’s victim’s brought her rape on herself. Judging by this question from Stelter, it doesn’t look like CNN has learned its lesson.
