Over two months after she was badly beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, CBS’s Lara Logan is recounting the ordeal for Sunday’s 60 Minutes (I can’t embed the CBS video in our blog template, but here’s a link). She’s also done an interview with the New York Times’ Brian Stelter, now online, in which she details the attack—“For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands”—but also the process of publicly acknowledging it and the stories of assault against other women in Cairo, and female journalists elsewhere.
Maybe the most unsettling thing about the video linked above is the camera footage taken moments before the assault began, as the camera lights go out and Logan and crew realize that they’re in danger. I would expect that CBS would not have used the footage had Logan not approved and felt it necessary. For her part, she tells the Times, she “decided almost immediately that she would speak out about sexual violence both on behalf of other journalists and on behalf of ‘millions of voiceless women who are subjected to attacks like this and worse.’”
She also adds, understandably, that she does not plan to do further interviews about the rape after 60 Minutes airs: “I don’t want this to define me.”
The 60 Minutes pieces airs Sunday night; Logan had her first day back at work yesterday.