CBS News chief correspondent Lara Logan, who sustained a severe beating and sexual assault while reporting in Egypt, was released from the hospital Tuesday and received a call from President Barack Obama Wednesday, reports ABC News and The Wrap.
Obama called Logan to offer his condolences, but the White House did not expand on the details of the call. Press secretary Jay Carney said, “Violence against journalists is unacceptable, and the perpetrators of violence needed to be held accountable.”
A friend of Logan’s told ABC News that Logan was released from the hospital on Tuesday at about 5 p.m.
Logan has returned to her Washington, D.C.-area home to be with her husband and children.
Logan was reportedly assaulted last week while covering Egypt’s celebration of former President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation. CBS News said in a statement that Logan was surrounded by “a mob of more than 200 people whipped into a frenzy” and separated from the news team. Logan suffered a “sustained sexual assault and beating” before being rescued by approximately 20 Egyptian soldiers and a group of women.
Before her sexual assault and beating, Logan had been detained in Egypt by police. She told Esquire that her news crew was “arrested, detained, and interrogated,” among other things. When Logan became violently ill, she was initially denied medical attention.
“Not at first, until I vomited so much that they did have a medic see me at this secret facility — they wouldn’t tell us where we were. Then I was begging for an IV, and at first they wouldn’t,” Logan said. “I vomited up everything that the medic gave me. I vomited all over the interrogation cell. I vomited all over this office they put me in after that, and so eventually they put me on an IV.”