3582 Women Assaulted At The UC Berkeley Anti-Milo Riot
The University of California at Berkeley was in flames on Wednesday after violent leftist rioters shut down the finale of Milo Yiannopoulos’s college lecture tour. Stefan Molyneux is joined by Katrina who attempted to attend the event only to be smashed in the head with a flagpole, pepper-sprayed and blinded with terror as her husband was assaulted to the point of hospitalization. Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
So, in our continuing coverage of what happened at UC Berkeley when Milo Yiannopoulos was prevented from speaking by a bunch of hooligans and thugs and people more than willing to use violence in the pursuit of their political ends, you may have seen a video with a young blonde woman who was being attacked or assaulted with a flagpole and pushed up against a railing.
This is Katrina.
She is listening to the show and she's going to talk to us about what it was like to be there.
You know, it's wild enough watching this video.
You know, my heart starts pounding and I get all kinds of fight or flight just looking at the video.
But Katrina, what was it like to be in the middle of this astonishing event?
Horrifying, terrifying.
Lots of words kind of come to mind.
In the moment, it's very interesting to see myself on video because the memory that I have in that moment doesn't exactly match what was on the video.
Now I see I was hit on the head.
What I remember is someone coming and I thought they were trying to attack my husband and I just got a very instant sort of Hell no, that's not happening reaction to it and push the guy back.
And immediately after that, I was pepper sprayed by this little all black clad ninja woman and that basically took me out of the whole fight.
So that's the second video I'm in where I am facing the railing and getting pushed up against it.
That's immediately after I was pepper sprayed and I just can't see anything.
I am not even processing anything that's happening.
I'm trying desperately to find my husband and hear his voice, and I can't hear him.
I can just hear one of my friends next to me.
And someone ends up saying, you know, we got to get out of here.
Climb the barricade.
So I started climbing.
People were helping me pull over, I think.
And unfortunately, I was in a spot where there was a little triangle, so I had to climb over a second barricade in order to actually get to safety, climbing over the second barricade.
I fell down and hit my head really hard.
I'd been diagnosed with a concussion.
And at that point, of course, I was still blind, still had just, you know, they got me real good, like right, right in the eyes.
And luckily, someone took care of me.
And pretty interesting, this was taking us up onto the steps where the event was supposed to happen, the Berkeley Student Center.
The police were all inside the building.
So they were inside this glass-enclosed building, looking out at all the mayhem.
Not intervening at all.
The legal aid person who was trying to help me banged on the glass with me and we were begging the police to let her and me in so that I could wash the pepper spray out of my eyes and they wouldn't unlock the building.
So all I could do was sit down on the ground and keep asking someone to try and find my husband because honestly I thought he was dead.
And we're still trying to figure out exactly what happened to him because he doesn't remember.
So what is the status of your husband at the moment?
He is recovering.
We spent all day yesterday in the hospital getting him checked out.
They were worried for a while that he might have had a bleed in his liver from the beating that he sustained.
He turned out to only have a couple of broken ribs.
No big deal, right?
Just broken ribs.
He's got cuts on his face.
He's got a cut on his shin.
He also has a serious concussion, pretty much going to be bedridden for a little while here while he recovers.
And yeah, I mean, to kind of put a little more context on that, both of us actually wore Kevlar vests to the event.
So he got beaten so badly that his ribs were broken through a Kevlar vest.
Now, if you can tell us what happened leading up to this.
Obviously, you were prepared for violence in the way that you were dressed.
What time did you arrive and was this a slow build or did it kind of pop out of nowhere?
Yeah, it was pretty surprising to me what we saw.
So, we came at 530.
The event was supposed to be at 8.
Our friends We're planning on meeting up at a cafe that was north of where the event was happening.
So we got off BART, which is south of where the event is happening, and we essentially walked down Bancroft, the street where most of the rioting took place.
So this is between 5.30 and 6.
We're walking up to the cafe, so we're seeing kind of what's happening sort of early on.
The event's not even supposed to happen until 8.
We already heard three explosions when we were walking by.
We saw two fires, including one in the middle of the road that resulted in them blocking the road, and there were three public trans buses just abandoned and empty already.
5.30, it's still daylight.
Hours before the event is even supposed to happen, right?
There were a couple of kids who seemed like students who were standing in the way of cars who were trying to get into the parking lot, just saying snarky things to them, like, no, we don't want you here.
Go away.
We're not moving.
Mostly it was just normal people, pedestrians, kind of walking around.
They had already pulled the fire alarm.
We were actually walking by, I think, right when they pulled down the generator that powered the lights and set it on fire.
We didn't see that happen.
We just saw the smoke starting to come up and then the fire was still there basically all night, at least as long as we were there.
And we were dressed very neutrally, intentionally.
We didn't wear anything to indicate that we were Trump supporters or MAGA hats or anything like that.
We didn't have anything like that.
So we just kind of walked through and everyone ignored us.
We got up to the cafe with our friends.
Our friends all came from different directions, so they didn't really see what things were like.
They were just expecting You know, like some of the other events have been, you know, you have a line of people waiting to get in, and then you have protesters on the other side of the line, and maybe they throw some bricks across, but, you know, for the most part, you just get in the line, you get in the event, and you'll probably be okay as long as you're not out in the melee.
So we said, you know, we were telling them, we're not, you know, I'm not sure you guys want to go there.
One of our friends was wearing high heels.
One of our friends was wearing a hat that said make Bitcoin, great again.
Another one was wearing a real MAGA hat and another one had a beanie that said Trump on it.
So if you see videos, those are the people.
But they wanted to walk back and try and get into the event.
As far as we knew, the event was on.
What we later found out was that the police had actually issued a dispersal order before we even got there at 530, but they never repeated it, and they didn't enforce it.
So we shouldn't even have been there, and we wouldn't have been there if we had been told at all that the police were shutting it down and that the event wasn't happening.
So at 530, the police had decided the event wasn't going forward and wanted the crowd to disperse, but then they retreated inside their glass houses and left everyone to fend for themselves.
Exactly, exactly.
And we had no idea that that had happened.
We found that out afterward from the news and watching video from earlier.
So we went back down there naively thinking we could actually get into the event.
And the doors weren't supposed to open until 7.
So we got down there around 6.30, thinking we had 30 minutes to kind of fend for ourselves before we'd be let into the building, which is why we were even down there.
So we tried to find the entrance that they would be letting us in.
We first went over by where the fire was.
Someone screamed that the police were about to shoot tear gas, so we evacuated there.
I'm still not sure what actually was shot.
It did sound like something gassy was shot, but I don't know.
Then some media was there, and they wanted to interview my friend with a Bitcoin hat because she's visibly part of the other side, and they're like, oh, we want both sides of the story, right?
So she does a couple of interviews, and having seen enough of this stuff, my husband and I were aware that you frequently will get attacked.
By BlackBlock, by Antifa, by those type of people while you're doing an interview, while you're distracted.
So we were trying to have her back and make sure that no one could sneak up on her and attack her.
And that's the other video that you've seen of the woman getting pepper sprayed while she's being interviewed by ABC7 News.
The woman came up all in black again with her face covered, came in between the guy who was interviewing her and the cameraman and stuck the pepper spray in and sprayed her in the face.
And it was just luck that she had already turned her face away because she was actually getting irritated with the interviewer, who was kind of an asshole, that she didn't really get it in the face.
You know, it kind of missed her.
And then she ran off.
And then the cameraman and the guy interviewing us had the gall to yell at us for being violent.
And had absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for what had just happened.
I mean, just no awareness.
I don't know if it's because they haven't been pepper sprayed.
It's horrible.
No, it's because it's the media, so it's the left.
And I've seen theories floating around from not tiny news sources that, oh no, they weren't really on the left.
They were right-wing provocateurs sent by 4chan.
And it's just like, oh man.
I haven't even been able to read any of what people are saying about this because having been there, it's just too painful.
I hesitate to use the word triggering, but a couple of my friends who were very worried about me and were very supportive have kind of heard from other friends and acquaintances of their skepticism about, did it even happen?
Maybe it wasn't really that bad.
No one was really hurt.
There aren't even any police reports.
And I can't even deal with it right now because I'm, you know, yesterday I was like, I'm literally in the hospital waiting to find out if my husband needs surgery on his liver because he was beaten while on the ground by...
He doesn't remember.
You were saying he doesn't remember what happened because of the head blows, I would assume, right?
Correct.
Yeah, yeah.
So the type of memory loss that he has is indicative that he was knocked unconscious.
So that's probably what happened and hopefully we find out eventually exactly what happened.
But...
That was sort of just the start.
I mean, the media thing was very frustrating to me because, you know, they ask us to do an interview and then that makes us vulnerable and people get hurt and they don't care, right?
They're, I don't know, they're just there to make money off of us being willing to talk to them, I guess, which...
I don't know.
I'm proud of my friend that she was willing to do that and take that risk.
I think it was brave.
It's not necessarily something that I would do again.
And so then the media fled when things started to get a little weirder.
My friend ran away after the pepper spray incident happened.
We followed her back out.
We're kind of still in the same area, but back out toward the street.
But at this point, you're still thinking that the event is going on and that you are going to be able to get in and this is going to pass, right?
Right.
It's not even 7 o'clock yet.
I don't want to say it wasn't violent because even when we were walking down, people were trying to knock my friend's MAGA hat off.
They were spitting at us.
Some people were saying, yeah, go Milo, high five.
But even these peaceful protesters, people who were just milling around, allegedly not doing anything, a lot of them were doing things.
And so the mix of the crowd, you could see it sort of starting to shift.
No more were there any people kind of going by on the way to class or heading home.
From dinner, it started to be more and more people in block, more and more people with their faces covered.
I've heard people saying there are 150 Antifa or BlackBlock whatever.
I would put it more at 300.
But the total number of protesters that they're quoting, the 1500, the 2000, I'm really skeptical of that.
I didn't think there were ever more than maybe 500 to 800 people total.
I'm not a professional crowd estimator.
I'm not sure what they're talking about.
But I think it changes the narrative because, of course, if they say, well, there were thousands of protesters but only 100 were violent, then they can portray that it was a small minority of the protesters who were violent.
But if it's, you know, 300 people beating people up and 600, then half the protesters are violent.
And it's important to remember, as you point out, that it's degrees, right?
I mean, it's not just black and white.
Totally peaceful, totally violent.
There are people who are doing spitting or tripping or I would take with a significant grain of salt.
Sorry, go ahead.
I was going to say that's one of the things that frustrates me about it is even in the position I was in, kind of in the thick of it, I wouldn't claim that I knew what was going on, right?
I have no idea.
I don't know what people are doing on the other side of Sproul Plaza.
I certainly don't know a lot of what happened after I was pepper sprayed.
So anyone who's out there claiming that they know everything that happened and that definitely everyone was peaceful or definitely everyone was violent, they're not telling the truth.
I mean, they might think they're telling the truth, but...
Or even if they think they know what proportion of people were violent in the protest mob.
I don't know if anyone has a clear idea of that.
I just know what I saw from where I was standing.
And one thing that always gets distorted to me in these events is the number of people who are there who are just looky loose.
So when we first got there, there were an awful lot of people there, but it was all people with cameras.
I don't mean all, but it was like a quarter to a half at any given time was people trying to film the stuff that was going on.
Can you call these the gladiator audience?
They're the gladiator audience, right?
That's what it was, yeah, which was creepy.
And then a lot of those people, you know, later they either disappear or when stuff gets violent, they just watch.
You know, they just watch and then they say that they were peaceful when they watch someone get, you know, beaten half to death in front of them.
So...
In any event, so we kind of ran out and some folks tried to chase us.
And we basically, I think, collectively decided as a group that if we ran, it was going to go bad, they would keep chasing us.
And we decided to turn and stand and face them.
And they were accusing us of being violent.
And we were like, you know, no, we were defending our friend.
Someone on your side came over and pepper sprayed our friend.
And they were like, no, that didn't happen.
And we were like, yes, it did.
We defended our friend.
Now what?
And this guy who was all fire before, you know, suddenly backs out and is like, oh, okay.
Sorry.
Well, they couldn't get the jump, right?
So they didn't have the advantage of numbers or surprise or sucker punching.
They didn't have the advantage of numbers, but I think we looked fierce.
We looked fiercer, maybe.
This rather tiny Afghani girl who came with us was...
Quite a firebrand, despite being in heels.
I think if you grow up Afghani and make it to the States, you're probably quite tough in many ways.
Definitely, yeah.
So then we went back in, still expecting the event was going to start.
We went back more or less where we were standing before, because we thought that might be where they'd open the door, since the other door was basically on fire.
And still waiting for 7 o'clock to come.
And shortly before 7 o'clock, this event The Black Bloc people decided to start their march.
So they basically lined up deeper into Sprawl Plaza than we were and were pushing out toward Bancroft, so they came past us.
And by the time we realized what was happening, we couldn't exit.
So we had no choice but to stand there against the barricade.
I mean, the barricade was there before I even got there at 530, right?
The police had set it up, presumably.
So all we could do was stand with our backs against the barricade and be very calm, very quiet, and hope that they would pass us without any violence.
But, of course, that didn't happen.
Pretty much after the very first people started past us, someone took a bright strobe-y flashlight and waved it in my friend's face and she slapped it away.
As soon as she slapped it away, they started saying, oh, oh, you guys are being violent, you're being violent, and started pushing us and shoving us, and we were telling them to back off, leave us alone.
And then, as you saw in the video, this guy came in with the flagpole and came at me or my friend or my husband or someone, And after that it was sort of just melee.
It looked like a coordinated push.
A bunch of people came in after the woman pepper sprayed and they just started wailing on us and everyone kind of just got out as they could from there.
Right.
And what is the feeling in facing this kind of violence for the sake of hearing some ideas from a fellow who you like?
I mean, does it not seem like a doorway to hell or just madness?
Or, I mean, what kind of country does it feel like when this is the result of wanting to come and hear someone you like give a talk?
Right.
Well, it certainly doesn't feel like the country that I grew up in.
I'm not that old, so I'm 30.
The country that I grew up in was here not that long ago.
I have a sibling who went to Berkeley a few years ago.
I don't know.
The Afghani girl who was with me put it very well.
She's like, this is the shit I left.
The smell, the smell of the rubber that they were burning in the bonfire.
She was like, that's what I smelled every day, you know, living in Afghanistan.
And that's why I left.
That's why my husband left that country.
And on the other hand, this has happened enough times with these events that We knew that there was a chance, you know, that this is how things were going to go down.
I was definitely surprised by the scale of it.
You know, days before the event, the Antifa group was organizing the event online out in public.
You could look on the page, which we did, which is why we were prepared.
Kind of confused when the Berkeley administration and the police claim that they were surprised by the number of protesters when they are literally RSVPing on Facebook.
I'm saying that they're going to show up.
I'm not sure.
We had a plan.
We had a plan that seemed to work better.
This is not James Barnes stuff to figure out what the plans are.
No, not really.
It's all sort of out there, and I don't know.
That part was pretty upsetting.
Honestly, if I came away with one thing, and this is adrenaline, obviously I need time to process whatever, but my main thought coming out of it was more or less fuck the police.
Yeah.
To be really blunt about it.
Earlier in the day, before things got violent, we ran into some other people who were trying to go to the event and we were chatting with them.
Of course, they were very nice, attractive, clean-cut people behaving very well.
One of them looked at the police and shouted, Blue Lives Matter.
We started chanting, Blue Lives Matter.
The police gave us a thumbs up and they waved to us.
They were like, yeah.
And then we needed them in a situation where weapons are banned.
You're not allowed to defend yourself in California in general.
They're certainly not on a UC campus, not in the city of Berkeley.
And they just left us there.
I mean, the people who helped us, they were volunteers.
They were legal aid people.
They were people who were there to film what was going on.
Some of them, I assume, probably didn't even agree with me, probably didn't want Milo there.
They were willing to step up and I appreciate that and I hope I get a chance to thank the people who help me one day.
And I wonder if the rioters knew ahead of time if there was any kind of stand-down order, knowing that they could do what they wanted to do without any interference from the people who basically say, yeah, you don't need any weapons because we'll protect you.
Or even if they didn't know that, they probably figured it out when at 5 o'clock they told them to disperse and then didn't do anything to enforce that order.
Right.
Right?
So this was many hours of, certainly the police kind of maybe seeming like they're going to do something and not doing it.
I can imagine how that might create some encouragement for those people.
It was also interesting to see the way that, even in the moment, people were trying to sort of craft the narrative.
So I had just been pepper sprayed very clearly to me by a protester, you know, by this black black ninja chick, and pulled away.
And immediately the person who took care of me was saying, oh, you got pepper sprayed, that's terrible.
Was it the police who pepper sprayed you?
It couldn't have been the police who pepper sprayed me.
And I was just like, no, no, it was a protester.
It was Antifa.
It was some woman who ran out and pepper sprayed me.
And they were just like, oh, really?
That's weird.
It's all happening right in front of you.
Come on.
And then they took me to another place.
I needed to go rinse my eyes out.
They wouldn't let us in the building.
So she took me to another.
I had to go pretty far.
Which is why I got so split up from the rest of my group to find a building that was unlocked so I could get into the bathroom and rinse my eyes out.
And it takes 15 to 30 minutes to rinse pepper spray out of your eyes.
It's god awful.
But so on the way there, you know, other people, she was running into other aid people and they were like, oh yeah, you got sprayed by the police.
And I was like, no, I wasn't sprayed by the police.
The police aren't doing anything.
I was sprayed by the protesters and everyone says, oh, that's weird.
Then the next day we go to the hospital.
And the person checking us in, we tell them, you know, we're at the Berkeley Riot.
That's where our injuries came from.
And she says, oh, wow.
Good for you for standing up against Milo.
This is, I mean, this is the weird thing.
I mean, this is the weird thing.
And I don't want to get off on a big old rant here.
But if, I can't imagine, but if Trump supporters or people on the right were...
Attacking people with flagpoles and setting fire to things and so on.
I would be front and center like, no, no, no, no, no.
This is absolutely wrong.
These people should be arrested.
This is not how we're going to have discourse in this country or any country for that matter.
I would be front and center.
And I know, I know there are so many people, if not just about everyone who's publicly supported Trump, would be out there saying, no, no, no, no, no.
This is not us.
This is not how we're going to do it.
And they would be roundly condemning it.
While it is absolutely horrible, and my heart breaks for what happened to you, for what happened to your husband, it is turning the light on in some very dark places on the left.
Because it's not just the individual protesters or rioters.
It's not just the thugs, the criminals.
It is the media as a whole, right?
Excusing, minimizing, explaining it away, saying it's some sort of false flag, saying that things that are basically...
False.
And excusing it.
You know, calling them protesters.
They're not protesters.
They're rioters and thugs.
And this is becoming very, very clear to people.
And of course, for a lot of these young people, like the people who are out there rioting, you know, maybe they're 18, right?
Well, so they were 10 years old when Obama came to power.
They've not known anything particularly different than this kind of forgiveness and excuse of this kind of violence.
So, yeah, I think they're going to have a bit of a shock when they see what comes down And I think UC Berkeley is going to have that kind of shock as well.
But it is revealing an enormous amount about the left and their either direct use of violence or tacit support of it, which is what enables it.
Yeah, absolutely.
I certainly hope so.
I mean, as far as my decision to attend the event, in general, if someone says, you can't hear this person and wants to stop it with violence, that makes me want to go.
I've done the same thing for speakers who I didn't agree with politically, people who are more on the left when that happens, but it doesn't happen as much, or at least it doesn't happen as much anymore, not in my lifetime.
And I certainly hope that it turns the light on, like you said, you know, one of the things you have to think about in that situation is if I'm that person who gets beaten to death against the fence, you know, I hear there's one guy who was beaten in the street even after he was down already unconscious and There were early reports saying that maybe he was actually dead.
I haven't heard what happened to him yet.
But if you're that guy, I mean, you gotta hope at least someone's got a camera on it and it makes some difference in the world because otherwise, you know, it's just a sad way to end your life.
And just imagine how it would be if Hillary had gotten into power.
These guys would, I think, pretty much have free reign for the next four to eight years.
Well, I really appreciate this update.
Thank you so much for coming forward and taking the time.
I wish you, and in particular your husband, who sounds like he got it pretty hard, I wish you guys the speediest of speedy recoveries.
Do stay in touch and stay safe.
And thank you so much for sharing this story to help people get a sense of what it was like who weren't there.
