Black May Have Played Up Mugging Incident in TV Ad

Over at the Nashville Post, Cari Wade Gervin looked into whether U.S. Rep. Diane Black exaggerated a mugging she describes in a campaign ad to make the ordeal out to be worse than it actually was.

From the Post:

In the television ad, Black claims three young men "were aggressive, they beat me up, they broke my cheekbone, and they ruptured a disc in my back and there was no one there to help me. They tried to get me in the car but I knew I could not let that happen. When the police arrived, they told me that if I had gotten in the car, I would have never come back."

But this morning, John Harris of the Tennessee Firearms Association appeared on WTN's Michael DelGiorno Show and said that according to a 1994 police report, Black was mugged near Vanderbilt by only one man who got out of a car, stole her purse, called her "a bitch" and punched her. According to Harris, the report makes no mention of an attempted kidnapping, nor does it note that an ambulance was called to the scene.

The report did confirm that Black was indeed mugged. It just wasn't by three men, and it didn't exactly happen the way she recounted it.

(You can read the police report over on the Post website, where you can see that the campaign also did not know the difference between the Nashville Post and the Nashville Scene.)

At first ask, Black's campaign would not comment on the differences between her ad and the police report. And then, when the post went up and the campaign did decide to comment, they said questioning Black's advertisement was — wait for it — victim shaming.

Let's talk for just a quick minute about the definition of victim shaming. Victim shaming is blaming a victim for what happened to them. It is not comparing a police report filed at the time of the incident to a campaign commercial using said incident as a reason to purchase a gun to defend yourself.

And let's be clear, Black is a victim here. She apparently just felt the need to stretch what happened to make it seem much worse than it actually was. Nobody would blame her for being mugged, but there's just no reason to exaggerate what sounds like a scary enough event on its own.