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Lara Logan Was Stripped, Punched, Slapped, Report Says

Feb 21, 2011 – 2:58 PM
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Dana Chivvis

Dana Chivvis Contributor

New details have emerged in the "brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating" inflicted on CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan in Egypt's Tahrir Square the night President Hosni Mubarak stepped down from power.

During the Feb. 11 attack, Logan was stripped of her clothes, punched and slapped by the crowd, according to the Times of London (via the Daily Mail.) She was beaten with the poles demonstrators used to fly flags during the protests, and red marks on her body initially believed to be bite marks turned out to be the result of pinching.

As she was being abused, the crowd of roughly 200 men chanted "Israeli" and "Jew," apparently believing her to be a spy. Egyptian state media had been reporting that Israeli spies were disguising themselves as television crews.

Finally, a group of women and approximately 20 guards rescued Logan, 39, from the mob and took her to the Four Seasons Hotel for medical treatment. She was flown out of Egypt hours later and taken to New York, where she spent five days in a hospital. She was released from the hospital on Wednesday to recover at her home in Washington, D.C., according to CBS.

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"Lara is getting better daily. The psychological trauma is as bad as, if not worse than, the physical injuries," an unnamed friend of Logan's told The Times. "She might talk about it at some time in the future, but not now."

The attack on Logan has sparked a fierce online debate over whether the reporter should have been in Egypt at all. NYU professor and journalist Nir Rosen resigned his position after writing on Twitter that Logan is a "war monger" and was "probably groped like thousands of other women, which is still wrong, but if it was worse than [sic] I'm sorry."

Read more at the Times of London (paywall protected) or the Daily Mail.
Filed under: World, Arab World Unrest
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