My name began to trend on Twitter across the United States, even though most people had no idea who I was. While I was in the emergency room, the video was being watched hundreds of thousands of times on social media. Mobile phone footage recorded by Jim Ryan, a news reporter with the Oregonian-Portland’s newspaper of record-captured part of the beating. At no point did police intervene to help. Outside of the Multnomah County Justice Center, the building that houses the Central Police Precinct, the Sheriff’s Office, and courtrooms, I was nearly killed by a violent mob. Later, in the emergency room of the Oregon Health and Science University hospital, I found out my brain was hemorrhaging. 1 I walked away, half blinded, to the county courthouse across Lownsdale Square before losing my balance.
“F-king owned, bitch!” shouted a local transsexual antifa militant and a member of the Satanic Portland Antifascists. I thought they were going to offer to help, but they just took photos and video. A crowd of cameramen surrounded and followed me. The mob roared in laughter as I stumbled away. I thought the beating was over, but next came the hailstorm of “milkshakes,” eggs, and other hard objects at my face and head. My eyes were beginning to swell with blood. I was bleeding from my ear and had open gashes all over my face. Someone bashed me on the head from behind with a stiff placard or sign. The masked thief melted into the crowd, a function of the “black bloc.” Another person ran up and kicked me twice in the groin. I desperately tried but failed to hold on to it. Someone then snatched my camera-my evidence.
I put my arms up to surrender, but this only signaled to them to beat me more ferociously. It’s likely some of them used brass knuckles as well. The masked attackers wore tactical gloves-gloves hardened with fiberglass on the knuckles. Suddenly, clenched fists repeatedly struck my face and head from all directions. Staring at an amorphous mob of faceless shadows, I froze. Ironically, all I saw next-and felt-was the pure embodiment of hatred. In the background, I could still hear the crowd chant, “No hate!” Never having been in a fight, I naively asked myself in the moment: “Did someone just trip and fall into me?” Before I could turn around to look, a sea of bodies dressed in black surrounded me. I was nearly knocked to the ground from the impact. By this point, the crowd’s chants had changed.īefore I made it much farther, someone-or something-hit me hard in the back of the head. Still, I ignored the stares and continued forward. The 48-year-old Rose City Antifa member has been arrested so many times at violent protests in Portland over the past few years that he no longer bothers to wear a mask. They glared and whispered in the ears of their comrades.
Working as a journalist with a phone and a new GoPro camera, I slowly made my way toward the front of the crowd. Together, the crowd of around four hundred brought traffic to a standstill-by now a regular occurrence in the City of Roses, as Portland is known by. Many also wore helmets and carried melee weapons. Most of them wore masks-long before the COVID-19 outbreak made them a norm of public life. These were the radical anarchist communists.
They were joined by dozens of people dressed head to toe in black. They paraded red flags printed with a rose logo, a symbol of the Democratic Socialists of America. Some of them wore red shirts and bandanas to broadcast their allegiance to Marxism. “W HOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!” the crowd of left-wing protesters chanted as they marched in the heart of downtown Portland, Oregon, in June 2019.
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