Lara Logan in Cairo, reporting for CBS News
The details are slight, but it makes the story no less disturbing:
"60 Minutes" correspondent Lara Logan suffered a "brutal and sustained" sexual assault at the hands of a large group of men while covering the Egyptian uprising, CBS News said.
It happened during Friday's jubilation in Cairo's Tahrir Square after President Hosni Mubarak finally stepped down.
"A dangerous element" in the crowd surrounded Logan and her crew, said CBS spokesman Kevin Tedesco. "It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into a frenzy. In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew," he said in a statement Tuesday.
"She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers."
Logan went home to the United States on the first flight Saturday and is recovering in a hospital, Tedesco said. [..]
At least 140 reporters have been injured or killed covering Egypt since Jan. 30, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Logan's personal life has been fodder for tabloids--and I'm not entirely sure some of it wasn't furthered by DC types threatened by her no-nonsense reporting of the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and her lack of fear of calling out pundits (aka Fox's Bill O'Reilly and Laura Ingraham) for their studio armchair war coverage heavy on spin and light on facts--but for the sake of her husband and child, I hope that the media respects her desire for privacy on this. It would be truly horrible to learn that she had been victimized quite so brutally again by pro-government forces because of her desire to report the truth on the ground.
