Bill O'Reilly faced off again on Thursday with the man whose close encounter with his umbrella gained worldwide fame. This time, however, the duel aired on separate cable news shows.
O'Reilly's angry Washington scuffle with Branden Lane rocketed around the Internet on Thursday. Lane, an activist with the Occupy movement, spotted O'Reilly coming out of a hotel and began filming him and asking him questions. O'Reilly promptly went at him with his umbrella and then tried to have him arrested.
On Thursday night, O'Reilly and Lane both addressed the incident — O'Reilly on his own show, and Lane on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown."
O'Reilly's version cast him as a man at the mercy of an unidentified, possibly deranged person. "Some guy comes up behind me screaming," he said, adding that, when Lane kept coming closer to him, "I turned and shielded myself and my assistant with an umbrella."
O'Reilly said he called the D.C. police because "I thought the guy was out of control," but was disappointed to find that Lane hadn't broken any laws. "This man could have had a knife!" he explained. He said he was lucky he had the umbrella and "held my temper," because "I'm sure the guy wanted me to hit him."
Lane's version of events was, unsurprisingly, a bit different.
"He didn't even try to shield himself," he told a gleeful Olbermann. "What we're seeing is the same thing we always see ... it's just another example of the type of percent he is." He said that O'Reilly's move with the umbrella knocked him off the sidewalk and into the street.
Olbermann noted the obvious irony of the situation: O'Reilly is as famous for his use of the television ambush as anybody ever has been. "Given the number of times he's run that scam, were you surprised that that was his reaction to you?" he asked.
Lane said he was "shocked" that O'Reilly hadn't handled the situation more calmly. But he said he did not regret the incident.
"He's the main informant for the one percent," he said. "People like him need to be checked and I'm glad we had the opportunity to do that."
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