CBS News 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan is back in the hospital in Washington, D.C., due to years-long complications stemming from the brutal sexual assault she endured in Egypt while covering the Arab Spring in early 2011, several sources close to her—including one family friend who went on the record—confirmed to Breitbart News on Monday evening.
A 60 Minutes spokesman also confirmed to Breitbart News late Monday that Logan was in fact hospitalized.
“Very few people know how stoic and incredibly tough this lady is. In spite of everything she’s had to face in the last two years, people have no idea the physical suffering she has been enduring due to the brutal sexual assault she encountered in Egypt during the Arab Spring while reporting for 60 Minutes,” Ed Butowsky, a close friend and confidante of Lara and her family, told Breitbart News. “I’ve been in and around this business and people don’t understand how hard reporters work and how much time they put in. Lara, above all of it, has been doing it for four years since this brutal attack and suffering in every way, shape or form. Maybe it’s time for people to realize these people are human beings.”
“We were sorry to hear this morning that Lara was readmitted to the hospital,” the 60 Minutes spokesman added in an email. “We wish her a speedy recovery.”
Butowsky said that Logan has been going in and out of the hospital for the last few years since returning after the brutal attack in Egypt, all while continuing reporting from the most dangerous places on earth and raising her family. Logan has two children. Specifically, Butowsky said, she has been in the hospital at least four times this year alone.
Butowsky said that Logan is in a hospital in the Washington area and asked that, to protect her privacy, the name of the specific hospital not be released until Logan is back out.
“It was amazing that on Sunday we watched her report—and do an amazing job on a piece on Christianity in Iraq—and she did the story while ISIS was just four to six miles from where she was reporting,” Butowsky said. “She did the story over the last four to six months on location in the face of ISIS all while suffering from the brutal sexual assault she suffered at the hands of evil forces at play during the Arab Spring. She has not only a mental but a physical tattoo of what these savages do to people. Tip your hat to all reporters brave enough to do this type of work.”
Logan came out on the record about the incident in an interview she gave to her own program, 60 Minutes, back in 2011.
“There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying,” Logan told 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley. “I thought not only am I going to die, but it’s going to be just a torturous death that’s going to go on forever.”
Logan was separated forcefully from her producer and bodyguard on Feb. 11, 2011, in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, by what the New York Times described as a “group of men who tore at her clothes and groped and beat her body.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Logan said of the men who separated her from her crew that “for an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands.”
In another interview with 60 Minutes, Logan confirmed that a woman saved her from the sexual assault.
“Just her eyes, I remember (I could see) just her eyes,” she said of the woman who saved her. “She put her arms around me. And oh my God, I can’t tell you what that moment was like for me. I wasn’t safe yet, because the mob was still trying to get at me. But now it wasn’t just about me anymore.”
The crowd she was covering was celebrating the toppling of then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who was soon replaced with the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi. Morsi has since been removed from office and tried multiple times for alleged criminal activities while he was in office.
Logan, when she came back to the U.S., has continued her reporting for CBS News. She was forced to take a leave of absence after an error she made in reporting on the Benghazi terrorist attack, where she attributed details to a government contractor who had misrepresented facts to her and others—something that eventually led to her appearing on air to apologize for the facts mistaken facts the contractor stated to her.
Several elements of the institutional left, including Salon, tried to get Logan fired over her Benghazi mistake. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s media hatchet man, David Brock, launched a what amounts to a campaign against her via his leftist group Media Matters for America. While she did end up taking a forced leave of absence, she has since restarted her reporting for CBS News, and just this weekend—as Butowsky noted—60 Minutes aired her piece on Christianity in Iraq.