Assault During Protest Coverage

This is what these people have been waiting for.

They came here day after day. This is about freedom.

She reported, without a hint of trouble, for more than an hour.

And what happened then?

Our camera battery went down.

And we had to stop for a moment, and suddenly Vaho looks

at me and says, "We've got to get out of here." Vaho

is not

happy here.

He's Egyptian, he speaks Arabic, and he can hear what the crowd is saying.

Yes.

He understands what no one else in the crew understands.

That's right. I was told later that, um, they were saying,

"Let's take her pants off." And it's like

suddenly, before I even know what's happening,

I feel hands grabbing my breasts, grabbing my crotch,

grabbing me from behind.

I mean, it, and it, it's, it's not, you know, one person and then it

stops. It's like one person and another person and another person.

And I know Ray is right there, and he's grabbing at me and screaming,

"Lara, hold

on to me. Hold on to me."

As she was pulled into the frenzy, the camera recorded her shout.

Stop!

And I'm screaming, thinking, if I scream, if

they know, they're going to stop. You know, someone's going to stop them, or

they're going to stop themselves because this is wrong.

And it was the opposite. As the more I screamed,

it turned them into, it, it turned them into a frenzy.

Someone in the crowd shouted that she was an Israeli, a Jew.

Neither is true. But to the mob, it was a match to gasoline.

The savage assault turned into a murderous fury.

I have one arm on Ray. I've lost the, the fixer.

I've lost the drivers. I've lost everybody except him.

And I feel them

tearing at my clothing. I think my shirt,

my sweater was torn off completely. My shirt was around my neck.

Um, I felt the moment that my bra tore.

They tore the metal, uh, clips of my bra.

They tore those open. And I felt that because the air, I felt the

air on my chest, on my skin.

And, uh,

I felt them tear out, they literally just tore my pants to

shreds.

And then I felt, um, my underwear go.

And I remember looking up. When, when my clothes gave way,

I remember looking up

and seeing them taking pictures with their cell phones, the flashes of

their cell phone cameras.

Ray reported that he found himself with

the sleeve of your jacket in his hand.

It had been completely ripped from the rest of the

jacket.

I felt at that moment that Ray was my only hope of survival.

You know, he, he was looking at me, and I could see his face, and we had

a sea of people between us, obviously tearing at both of us,

beating us. I didn't, I didn't even know that they

were beating me with, um,

flagpoles and sticks and things because I couldn't even feel

that because I think

of the, of the sexual assault was all I could feel, was their hands

raping me over and over and over again.

Raping you with their hands?

Yeah.

Nonstop-

From the front

... during this whole time

... from the back. And, um,

I didn't know if I could hold on to Ray.

I'm holding on to him. I didn't want to let go of him .

I thought, I thought I was going to die if I lost hold of

him.