Former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields blasted the publication Monday, saying her former employer hoped to get more exclusive interviews with Donald Trump after she was allegedly assaulted by the presidential candidate’s campaign manager.
In an interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on “The Kelly File” Monday, Fields said she resigned from Breitbart because “I realized that my company didn’t have my back. I can’t stand with a company that won’t stand for me. They knew the truth from the very beginning.” (RELATED: Breitbart’s Michelle Fields And Ben Shapiro Resign)
Fields, who used to work for The Daily Caller, claims that during a press conference last week Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski allegedly grabbed her arm, leaving a bruise. (RELATED: Reporter Posts Photo Of Bruise After Saying Trump Campaign Manager ‘Yanked Me Down’)
Fields said, “My editor, as soon as it happened had spoken to Corey. He told me Corey had admitted to it and I was getting an apology so I stayed quiet. I wasn’t going to make a big deal about it.”
“Look, it’s bruises. Whatever. It’s fine. I thought. I’m not going to make a huge deal. And that didn’t happen. I never got the apology. Instead they embarked on this smear campaign against me,” Fields claimed. “So they knew the truth, my company knew the truth, and they’re siding with Donald Trump.”
“And I have to say when this happened my Washington editor Matthew Boyle said, ‘Don’t worry, this is going to be great because Donald Trump is going to give us so many exclusives now because they’re going to feel like they have to do it because of what they did,'” Fields claimed. “This is how my company was looking at this. Instead of saying, ‘Wow, what happened, are you OK? Let’s defend you.’ They were thinking this was a good thing because we would get more access to Donald Trump.”
Ben Shapiro, former Editor-At-Large of Breitbart, claimed during the same segment with Kelly that he resigned because “the fact is, Breitbart has unfortunate[ly] become a Trump Pravda site.”
“The problem for me is once you, any news organization, any media organization, one your loyalty to a political campaign trumps your loyalty to your own reporters, I’m out. That’s not something I can back and that’s not something anybody decent should back. And I’m disgusted by the fact that my mentor, Andrew Breitbart started this organization to fight bullies and in my opinion, this organization has turned into an organization that actually promotes bullies in order to get close contact with they bullying campaign.”
“The fact is, I think any objective observer of Breitbart News could see for months that Breitbart had become a very, very strong advocate for Donald Trump,” Shapiro acknowledged. “The problem for me became absolutely clear when they decided to abandon their own reporter.”
Later Shapiro added that this is a story because, “Well, I think the idolatrous worship of the Trump campaign by some people in the media leading to them covering up the truth is a major story.”
“[T]he Trump campaign never acknowledges mistakes, never acknowledges their responsibility for violence, never acknowledges anything that they do wrong. It’s a no-apologies campaign. That’s why he’s popular. That does have consequences and does have victims. In this case, it was just a bruise on the arm. There are other cases where it’s more that.”
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