Update 3/29/2016:
On the morning of March 29, Corey Lewandowski was charged with alleged battery relating to the incident described below. The Trump campaign has put out a statement asserting that “Mr. Lewandowski is absolutely innocent of this charge. He will enter a plea of not guilty.”
Responding to a question at CNN’s Republican candidate town hall, Ted Cruz said the alleged assault was “consistent with the pattern of the Trump campaign.” He continued that Trump’s campaign was “built on attacks, on insults, and I think there is no place in politics for insults, for personal attacks, for going to the gutter, and there should be no place for physical violence either.”
The Jupiter Police Department has released CCTV footage of the incident. Fields, in the white blazer, is walking with Trump towards the bottom right corner of the screen when Lewandowski allegedly grabs her arm and pulls her back.
March 11, 2016
Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields has filed a police report against Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. The Jupiter Police Department released a statement this morning that they were investigating an alleged battery, which occurred when Fields tried to ask Donald Trump a question as he was leaving an event at Trump National, his golf club in Florida, on March 8.
The charge comes after the two camps — Fields and most of the journalism world in one, and Lewandowski, Trump, and their base in the other — have disputed the event on Twitter and in interviews.
Fields has posted pictures of the bruises on her arm, allegedly from Lewandowki, and has said she would take a lie detector test to confirm her narrative of what happened. Politico recently released an audio recording of the incident, which captures Fields attempting to ask a question, followed by a few seconds of muffled noise and then her discussing the event with a shocked Ben Terris, of the Washington Post.
There’s been some talk that Terris’s claims since then — that it was Lewandowski who grabbed Fields — were mistaken. The Washington Post‘s Eric Wemple investigated that aspect of the story in more depth recently. But a CSPAN video published this hour by The Daily Beast seems to prove Fields’s claim beyond doubt:
The Trump camp, for their part, have denied the whole thing. Lewandowski called Fields an “attention seeker” yesterday and said she made the charge up. When asked about it after last night’s debate, Trump took Lewandowski’s cue:
If Fields’s charges are true, the whole thing still doesn’t make much sense. As she told Ben Terris immediately after the incident: “You’re going against a Breitbart reporter? The people that are nicest to you?”
Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski speaks with an unidentified aide after a demonstrator was detained at a rally at the Dayton International Airport in Dayton, Ohio March 12, 2016. REUTERS/William Philpott
