Lara Logan breaks her silence on ’60 Minutes’

NEW YORK — Breaking a months-long silence, CBS war correspondent Lara Logan talked to “60 Minutes” on Sunday night about what really happened to her in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. On the night of Feb. 11, as the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak was falling, Logan joined the more than 100,000 people celebrating in
the square, where she says a mob turned on her and sexually assaulted
her.

“Suddenly, before I even know what’s happening, I
feel hands grabbing my breasts, grabbing my crotch, grabbing me from
behind,” she told Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes.”

Things quickly spiraled out of control. “I think my
shirt, my sweater was torn off completely,” she said. “My shirt was
around my neck. I felt the moment that my bra tore. … And I felt them
tear out, they literally just tore my pants to shreds. … I didn’t
even know that they were beating me with flagpoles and sticks and
things, because I couldn’t even feel that. Because I think of the
sexual assault, was all I could feel, was their hands raping me over
and over and over again. … They were tearing my body in every
direction at this point, tearing my muscles. And they were trying to
tear off chunks of my scalp, they had my head in different directions.”

Logan said she was fighting for 25 minutes and
didn’t think she would live. “I was in no doubt in my mind that I was
in the process of dying,” she said. But thinking about her two children
at home in Washington helped her focus on staying alive.

Eventually, she said, she was rescued by a woman
dressed head to toe in black religious robes. “Just her eyes, I
remember (I could see) just her eyes,” Logan said. “She put her arms
around me. And oh my God, I can’t tell you what that moment was like
for me. I wasn’t safe yet, because the mob was still trying to get at
me. But now it wasn’t just about me anymore.

“It was about their women and that was what saved me, I think,” she said. “The women kind of closed ranks around me.”

Logan flew back to Washington,
where she spent four days in a hospital as she was treated for cuts,
bruises and internal tearing. She’s been recovering at home with her
husband and children. “I felt like I had been given a second chance
that I didn’t deserve,” she said of her family. “I came so close to
leaving them, to abandoning them.”

Logan told “60 Minutes” that she was speaking out to
help end the code of silence surrounding sex assaults on female
journalists.

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