The trials of Lara Logan, hospitalized again

There wasn’t any doubt in Lara Logan’s mind. She was going die. Naked, attacked and in the middle of a mob, she was going to die.

It was Feb. 11, 2011, and Logan had reached the center of Cairo’s Tahir Square, which had been rushed by thousands of revelers cheering the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s government. “The city was on fire with celebration,” she recalled in an interview with the New York Times. But, she added, “there was a moment that everything went wrong.” Some men in the crowd starting saying they wanted to take off her pants. She was soon separated from her bodyguards and cameramen.

“For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands,” she told the Times, estimating the mob’s size at between 200 and 300 men. She only escaped, she said, after an Egyptian woman saved her. Afterward, she commented that sexual violence was different than other forms of assault: “You only have your word. The physical wounds heal. You don’t carry around the evidence the way you would if you had lost your arm in Afghanistan.”

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More than four years removed from that brutal day, the hard-charging reporter who became famous from her conflict-zone reporting may still be recovering.

On Tuesday morning, CBS News said she had gone to a hospital in Washington. “We were sorry to hear that Lara was readmitted to the hospital yesterday and we wish her a speedy recovery,” a spokesman told CNN. The spokesman didn’t elaborate on the cause of her visit.

But Brietbart News, which first broke the story, said it interviewed several people close to her who said her hospitalization resulted from complications related to her sexual assault. Ed Butowsky, described as a close friend and confidant, told the publication that Logan has been in and out of hospitals due to complications. He said this would be her fourth trip this year.

“Very few people know how stoic and incredibly tough this lady is,” he told Breitbart News. “In spite of everything she’s had to face in the last two years, people have no idea the physical suffering she has been enduring to the brutal sexual assault she encountered in Egypt during the Arab Spring while reporting for 60 Minutes. … Lara, above it all, has been doing it for four years since this brutal attack and suffering in every way, shape or form. Maybe it’s time for people to realize these people are human beings.”

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Four days after her assault, CBS News released a short statement that explained Logan had “suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating.” Months passed before another word emerged of what had happened to her. Then she granted twin interviews to the New York Times and “60 Minutes” describing a horrifying ordeal.

“The more I screamed, it turned them into a frenzy,” she told “60 Minutes.” “… I don’t even know that they were beating me with flagpoles and sticks and things. Because the sexual assault was all I could feel, their hands raping me over and over and over again. They were trying to tear off chunks of my scalp … not trying to pull out my hair, holding wads of it literally trying to tear my scalp off my skull.”

The intervening years have been difficult for Logan. One month after the attack on an American embassy in Benghazi in 2012, she publicly vented. “When I look at what’s happening in Libya, there’s a big song and dance about whether this was a terrorist attack or a protest,” she said. “And you just want to scream, ‘For God’s sake, are you kidding me?’ … I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors who are going to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked.”

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The comments proved a troubling introduction to her fatally flawed CBS report — a harrowing account of a British security contractor who said he had fought off terrorists who killed four Americans. The report quickly unraveled after The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung reported the contractor directly contradicted himself in an incident report to his employee. In that report, he said he wasn’t even there. “We could not get anywhere near … as roadblocks had been set up,” he said.

Within weeks, CBS News ordered a contrite Logan to take an unspecified leave of absence following an internal review, as The Post’s Paul Farhi reported, that called her story “deficient in several respects.”

Logan has since returned to CBS, putting together a powerful piece on Christian life in war-torn Iraq under the Islamic State, also known as “ISIS.” “She did the story over the last four to six months on location in the face of ISIS all while suffering from the brutal sexual assault she suffered at the hands of evil forces at play during the Arab Spring,” friend Butowsky said.

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