As promised, Fox News' Jesse Watters went on Bill O'Reilly's show tonight to discuss his "scuffle" with Huffington Post's Ryan Grim.
It was pretty anti-climactic, actually. After showing some of his own "ambush" clips from the WHCD, Watters said he regretted the incident, and that he never punched Grim, or as BillO called him, the "far left guy."
Amanda Terkel, on the other hand, had a lot to say about what happened. She also put up the video Grim shot from his phone.
The video above (which contains some explicit language) shows the minutes leading up to the confrontation. Grim tried to get Watters to bury the hatchet with me regarding a 2009 incident in which he ambushed and harassed me while I was on vacation because I’d dared to write a critical post about Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. Grim walked up to Watters — while filming with his phone — and asked him to come over and apologize to me. Watters refused. I also said I wasn’t interested in talking.
Grim continued to film, which Watters — who has made a living from ambushing people and filming them unexpectedly — couldn’t handle. He grabbed Grim’s phone out of his hand and tossed it away. When Grim returned, still filming, Watters again snatched the phone, pocketed it and refused for several minutes to give it back. He also tried to delete the video. When Grim went to retrieve the phone, fisticuffs ensued.
“Most of it seemed like the beginning of a WWE match when wrestlers are arms locked,” witness Adam Green later told The Huffington Post in an email. “Some shoving. Some drink glasses falling to the ground.”
On Monday, O’Reilly and Watters addressed the incident on “The O’Reilly Factor.” O’Reilly claimed that “this Grim character had no business bothering Jesse Watters about anything, but that is what the far left does. They seek to harm people with whom they disagree.”
Watters said he regretted the situation.
“I was at this party trying to enjoy myself. This guy came up to me. He starts putting it in my face,” Watters said. “I was friendly at first, and then he started getting a little obnoxious. Things happened, and I regret it happened, and that’s all it is.”
You should read the whole article, because it goes all the way back to 2009 when Terkel was writing for ThinkProgress and Watters stalked her on her vacation. I'm sure he was demure about the incident because he didn't really want to admit all the crummy things he's done while stalking liberal writers with his phone.
Terkel:
Watters’ way of confronting his subjects is to thrust cameras in their faces unexpectedly and pepper them with aggressive questions. It’s surprising, then, that he wasn’t more prepared to have the same thing done to him.
Instead, he asked Grim if they could find a better time to talk.
“Not tonight,” he told Grim. “Not tonight.”
Presumably, in the future, he’ll offer his targets the same courtesy — and won’t mind if they grab his camera and keep it.
Update: Oh, I forgot to mention that BillO was totally down with punching Grim. He said he'd have done it for Watters. What a guy.
