LAPD searches for Trump supporter harassed after allegedly making racial slurs in Hollywood
Los Angeles police are searching for a Trump supporter who was harassed by a crowd and apparently bumped to the ground in Hollywood this week after making what were described as racial slurs.
A videotape taken Thursday and uploaded to YouTube showed the unidentified female supporter, wearing dark glasses and a gray hoodie, sitting silently on Hollywood Boulevard near Highland Avenue, apparently to protect Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Earlier this week, James Lambert Otis was arrested by Los Angeles police on suspicion of felony vandalism for allegedly using a pickax to demolish the Republican presidential nominee’s star.
The videotape showed the woman displaying several pro-Trump signs that complained about immigrants without legal status and blasted President Obama for purportedly selling out African Americans. A heavyset man with glasses and tattoos then moved in to tear up her signs, leading her to push back at him and fall to the ground.
As she lay prone, some onlookers jeered her with profanity.
“You spewed hate and you got hate,” one man is heard to say. “You got exactly what you were dishing out.”
Another man, however, asked the crowd to “let her be” while another said, “She obviously has a little bit of mental difficulties.” A woman is heard to ask if she needed water or an ambulance.
The videotape prompted headlines on conservative news sites, such as Breitbart News, and several calls to police asking why they did not intervene. LAPD Officer Tony Im said Friday that police would write up a misdemeanor battery report on behalf of the woman, using the video and information they obtained from her at another confrontation in Hollywood on Wednesday.
On that day, Im said, the woman also incited the crowd with what he called racial slurs. Police from the Hollywood station went to the scene and “kept the peace,” he said.
Police took down her name and Los Angeles address at the time, but Im did not have the information available for release. He said police would visit the address she gave to interview her.
“We had a lot of people upset that we didn’t do anything,” Im said. “If she’s a victim, she has a right to come forward.”
Trump attorney Michael Cohen said in a tweet Friday afternoon that he is also looking for the woman, and that Trump “has a gift for her.”
Koali Fikator, who took the video and posted it, wrote on YouTube that onlookers gave the woman food, drink and called for emergency services after the altercation. He said the woman was fine.
“SHE REFUSED TO BE HELPED, got up, and kept on with her hateful rhetoric, writing a new sign saying: “[expletive] Mexicans, vote for Trump,” Fikator wrote.
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UPDATES:
11:25 p.m.: Updated with the tweet from Trump’s attorney.
This article was first published at 10:30 p.m.
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