Six Ex-Colleagues: O'Reilly Lied About 1992 LA Riots 'Attack' Newsmax
Six Ex-Colleagues: O'Reilly Lied About 1992 LA Riots 'Attack'
Friday, February 27, 2015 03:52 PM
By: Joel Himelfarb
Accusations continue to mount against Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, with six former colleagues now claiming he has lied about being attacked by thugs while covering the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Six people who joined O'Reilly in covering the riots for "Inside Edition" said in interviews with the Guardian that they do not remember an incident which O'Reilly has described where "we were attacked by protesters" and "concrete was raining down."
"They were throwing bricks and stones at us," O'Reilly said in 2006. He said "the cops saved our butts that time."
Several members of group said O'Reilly may be overstating a confrontation with an angry Los Angeles resident who smashed a camera with a piece of debris.
Two group members said the man may have been upset with O'Reilly for behaving rudely after arriving at the smoldering ruins of a neighborhood in a limousine whose driver started to polish the vehicle. O'Reilly is said to have exited the limousine and yelled at the resident, saying at one point: "Don't you know who I am?"
The man "was watching us and getting more and more angry," said Theresa McKeown, director of West Coast operations for the program. "Bill was being Bill — complaining 'people are in my eye line' — and kind of being very insensitive to the situation."
Rick Kirkham, another member of the "Inside Edition" team, said O'Reilly's behavior "was just so out of line. He starts barking commands about 'this isn't good enough for me,' 'this isn't gonna work.'"
The local man "lost it," said McKeown.
Enraged, he is said to have leaped on to the "Inside Edition" team’s flatbed trailer, kicked over a light, and thrown a piece of rubble, which smashed the camera.
Neil Antin, another member of the crew, said he restrained the man, but O'Reilly continued taunting him while a producer stood between them.
"Come on, you wanna take me? I'll take you on," O’Reilly is said to have shouted at the man.
A passing police car was flagged down, and several more officers eventually arrived. Crew members said that before this, O’Reilly had been taken inside one of the "Inside Edition" team’s vehicles by a colleague.
"It wasn't a police rescue," said reporter Rick Kirkham.
The television crew told the police they did not want to press charges, the man went home, and irritated police officers instructed the crew to leave the area.
Asked if O’Reilly’s behavior was to blame for the incident, McKeown replied: "I mean, it would have pissed me off. There didn't seem to be a sensitivity for what these people were going through. It was more, 'I'm here to do my show.'"
Kirkham said O'Reilly had provoked the man, who was upset with "O'Reilly’s attitude."
In an interview with syndicated talk-show host Hugh Hewitt earlier this week, O'Reilly reiterated his claim that "we were attacked by protesters, where bricks were thrown at us."
A Fox News spokeswoman dismissed the allegations against O'Reilly as "nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates" and said Fox News "maintains its staunch support for O'Reilly, who is no stranger to calculated onslaughts."
O'Reilly has been accused of multiple distortions of the truth by liberal media outlets in recent days. He has been attacked for allegedly exaggerating claims that he was in a combat zone during the 1982 Falklands War, and that he was outside the home of a former associate of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald when he killed himself. O'Reilly has also been accused of claiming to have witnessed the murder of four American nuns in El Salvador when he was not in the country.
