Several former colleagues now claim that Bill O'Reilly also lied about his experience covering the Los Angeles riots in 1992.
O'Reilly has on occasion referenced an incident when he and his crew had to take cover during his time as a host for "Inside Edition." "They were throwing bricks and stones at us," O'Reilly claimed in a 2006 interview. “Concrete was raining down on us. ... The cops saved our butts that time."
But six people who worked alongside the Fox News host in California at the time told the Guardian that they have no recollection of being attacked by protesters.
“It didn’t happen,” said Rick Kirkham, the lead reporter on the riots for "Inside Edition." “If it did, how come none of the rest of us remember it?”
In addition to Kirkham, crew members Bonnie Strauss, Tony Cox, Theresa McKeown, Bob McCall and Neil Antin also told the Guardian that O'Reilly had exaggerated an altercation that took place with a single person. From the Guardian:
Several members of the team suggested that O’Reilly may instead be overstating a fracas involving one disgruntled Los Angeles resident, who smashed one of their cameras with a piece of rubble.
Two members of the team said the man was angered specifically by O’Reilly behaving disrespectfully after arriving at the smoking remains of his neighborhood in a limousine, whose driver at one point began polishing the vehicle. O’Reilly is said to have shouted at the man and asked him: “Don’t you know who I am?”
Bob McCall, the sound man at the time, said that he remembers one resident hitting the camera being used to film O'Reilly.
“It was one person with one rock,” McCall said. “Nobody was hit.”
Other colleagues, like Tonya Freeman, told the newspaper they "don’t recall watching or hearing" the aggressive attacks O'Reilly has described.
O'Reilly reiterated the claim on the "Hugh Hewitt Show" last week.
"We were attacked, we were attacked by protesters, where bricks were thrown at us," he said.
A Fox News spokesperson issued the following statement to The Huffington Post on Friday:
Bill O’Reilly has already addressed several claims leveled against him. This is nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates. Responding to the unproven accusation du jour has become an exercise in futility. FOX News maintains its staunch support of O’Reilly, who is no stranger to calculated onslaughts.
The new allegations come after several other colleagues and journalists have accused the host in recent days of embellishing his war reporting experience. The controversy began last Thursday, when Mother Jones writers David Corn and Daniel Schulman published a scathing report indicating that O'Reilly had misreported his experience in Argentina during the Falklands War in 1982.
On Tuesday, a former colleague claimed that O'Reilly also lied about being present at a Florida suicide. The very next day, more allegations emerged regarding inaccuracies in a story O'Reilly had told about witnessing the murder of four churchwomen during the civil war in El Salvador.
