Nir Rosen to Anderson Cooper on Lara Logan Assault tweets: ‘I was a jerk’
I don’t know Nir Rosens politics. And i don’t know his motive behind wanting to insult a raped reporter and wish for the rape of another. But it is so refreshing to see someone actually take responsibility for callous remarks. Unlike some people Breit*cough*bart. Most people have said something stupid they regret but not everyone has the character to acknowledge that.
Nir Rosen, the journalist whose tweets joking about Lara Logan’s assault caused an uproar and forced him from his position as an NYU fellow on Wednesday, appeared on Anderson Cooper’s show on Wednesday night to talk about what had happened. He told Cooper he was a “jerk” for writing his tweets, but insisted that he had not known the full details of what had happened to Logan when he first tweeted.
Cooper said he had a hard time believing that Rosen was telling the truth. Before he brought Rosen on, he noted that one of his tweets said, “Yes, yes, it’s wrong what happened to her, of course. I don’t support that. But it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson, too.”
In Cooper’s eyes, this meant that Rosen seemed ” to be saying it would be funny if I were sexually assaulted or more violently assaulted in some way than I had already been, again, what appears to be a clear indication he knew what kind of attack Logan had suffered.”
But Rosen denied this. Speaking to Cooper from the Middle East, he said he didn’t have an explanation or excuse for what he had done—only that “I was a jerk.”
Rosen said he was tweeting at 2 AM, and “was being thoughtless, forgetting that I wasn’t just talking to a couple of people, but I was talking, in theory, to hundreds of thousands of people.”
Cooper pressed him on whether he had read the CBS statement on Logan, which said she had suffered a “brutal and sustained sexual assault.” Cooper wondered how Rosen could not have read such a short statement before linking to it and commenting about it on Twitter.
“Yes, I should have read it,” Rosen said. “I just heard the word assault, not that that’s just — no matter what I say, it doesn’t sound good.”