Alleged Bathroom Grabbing
On MSNBC Live, on August 28, 2007, Carlson told host Dan Abrams that as a teenager, an apparently homosexual man allegedly grabbed Carlson in a public restroom in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. As Carlson explained, "I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the – you know, and grabbed him, and...hit him against the stall with his head, actually.... And then the cops came and arrested him."
In the initial exchange, Carlson only described the man as having "bothered him" in the restroom. A day later, Carlson described the incident in a statement to Media Matters for America, which had reported on the exchange, writing:
In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men's room in Washington, D.C. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men's room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived. Several bloggers have characterized this is a sort of gay bashing. That's absurd, and an insult to anybody who has fought back against an unsolicited sexual attack. I wasn't angry with the man because he was gay. I was angry because he assaulted me.In multiple later airings of the August 28, 2007 episode of MSNBC Live, Carlson's comments about the 1980s incident were omitted. After his second statement, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) expressed outrage and called on Carlson and MSNBC to apologize for "remarks that appear to condone violent assault" against gay people.
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