The Trump Campaign Is Dangerous for Women, Too

Slash-and-burn politics in the Twitter Age can be horrifying. The Trump campaign is trying to master it. On women reporters.

Michelle Fields, seconds before Trump's campaign manager yanked her away.

Read this Michelle Goldberg piece in Slate. It's chilling. Here's a taste:

Nevertheless, Trump’s camp not only denies that any incident [Trump's campaign manager grabbing Fields] occurred—it has tried to destroy Fields’ reputation, painting her as an attention-seeking drama queen. First, campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks issued a statement insisting that nothing happened, adding, “We leave to others whether this part of a larger pattern of exaggerating incidents, but on multiple occasions she has become part of the news story as opposed to reporting it.” Hicks mentioned that Fields reported being beaten by police while covering Occupy Wall Street in 2011. It is well-documented that many reporters covering Occupy Wall Street were roughed up by the NYPD. There is photographic evidence that Fields was one of them; Thursday night, her boyfriend, Daily Caller editor Jamie Weinstein, tweeted a photograph of her being pushed down by police at the protest. 

Thursday afternoon, Lewandowski tweeted, “Michelle Fields is an attention seeker who once claimed Allen West groped her but later went silent.” He included a link to an article by the right-wing writer Charles Johnson about two women who’ve accused West of sexual harassment; it makes it clear that Fields, who “repeatedly and emphatically refused comment on the record,” tried to stay out of the story. The sum total of the case against Fields, then, is that in several years of journalism, she has allegedly encountered both one lecherous man in power and one instance of police behaving badly. I know of no female journalist who covers breaking news for whom the same could not be said.

There's growing evidence that Lewandowski did physically restrain Michelle Fields while she was engaged in the very common practice of sidling up to a politician to get a chance at a quick one-on-one question as an event, such as a press conference, ends. Now it's okay to drag a woman nearly to the ground, then attack her mercilessly on Twitter and in the press.

Disgusting. Read the whole Goldberg piece.

Building around this story:

• Proof begins to gather that Lewandowski did physically restrain Fields enough to cause bruising.
• Washington Post reporter backs Fields' story.
• Fields posts pic of bruising on Twitter. 
• Conservative news/opinion site, The Daily Caller, where Fields' boyfriend works, posts a balanced report of the incident (Breibart, where Fields works, backs her, after a fashion).
• Audio surfaces backing Fields and WaPo reporter who backed her story.
• Nasty Lewandowski tweet attacking Fields. Twitter is not kind to Lewandowski.
• Boyfriend tweets proof that Lewandowski lied about Fields' "habit" of playing for attention.
• Michelle Fields presses charges.

My best guess is this lasts another 24-hour news cycle and dies. Or, we hear about what happened with the charges, weeks from now, below the fold. Meanwhile, everyone remembers something about that hysterical reporter who used to work for Breitbart. (hope not, but...)