Video circulating online this week showed a Democratic activist being thrown to the ground by an Arizona Senate candidate at a GOP mixer Saturday, but the candidate says there’s more to the story.
Peter Jackson, 73, wore a “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt, a “Jail Trump” hat, and an N-95 mask to the meet-and-greet with GOP candidates at the Continental Shopping Plaza in Green Valley, Arizona. He also carried a GoPro camera, which captured his assault.
A video of the incident on Twitter begins with a woman filming Jackson on her cell phone before punching him with her right fist. The clip posted by Ron Filipkowski has been viewed over 400,000 times.
A masked-up guy with a BLM shirt crashed this GOP event tonight. Started causing trouble, then he hit a woman. So me and some guys put him on the ground, then the police came for him.
Fake news headline tomorrow: Senate Candidate Blake Masters ATTACKS Peaceful Protestor! pic.twitter.com/FgCmlZfsaq
— Blake Masters (@bgmasters) June 5, 2022
Quickly after, Jackson’s jostling camera showed Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters lunging toward the activist and grabbing him with both hands.
The older man fell to his knees. A group of men threw him out of the building and left him on the ground outside.
“Lock the door!” a woman could be heard yelling.
A man standing over Jackson said, “You can’t hit a woman, what the hell is wrong with you?”
The clip did not appear to show Jackson hitting anyone, nor did a longer 9-minute cut from his GoPro shared on YouTube.
Nonetheless, Masters doubled down on that version of the story, saying in his own video that “me and a couple guys intervened” after Jackson “hit a woman.”
“Now he’s being wheeled out on a stretcher, so you know what the New York Times headline is going to be,” he said to raucous applause from supporters. “‘U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters punches a peaceful elderly protestor.’ That’s the kind of treatment that the left-wing media has been giving me lately.”
Attendees of the event also called 911 and gave statements to Pima County Sheriff’s deputies about Jackson’s alleged infractions, according to Green Valley News. He was cited for trespassing and simple assault.
Amalia Halikias, Masters’s campaign manager, told Newsweek the candidate’s claim was supported by footage of “plenty of people remarking, in the heat of the moment, that the agitator hit the woman.”
“That is what Blake saw,” Halikias added. “The man struck the woman with his hand, hitting her in the face. At that point, Blake stepped in and restrained him so he could not hit her again.”
Masters, who has been endorsed by Donald Trump, recently came under fire for promoting a conspiracy theory about the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. In newly surfaced audio, he suggested that the riot may have been a false-flag operation set up by the FBI.
In April, Masters attributed the nation’s high rates of gun violence to Black Americans.
“We do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence,” he said on a local Arizona radio show. “It’s gangs, it’s people in Chicago, in St. Louis, shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly.”
Newsweek reached out to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department for comment.
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