Lara Logan: I Chose Resilience Over Defeat | Stories Of Us | PragerU

I was a mom of about 200 men, tearing at my hair, tearing at my clothes, and they were fighting for pieces of my body. I survived, I guess, all the odds. My name is Lara Logan, and this is my story. I was born and raised in South Africa. I really loved my home. I had a lot of brothers and There were, I think, seven of us. My mother was a feisty, half Sicilian, half Irish woman. My father, Scottish and Irish. And we were raised to treat people with respect. So I had that, I think it's very powerful, profound foundation in life. Growing up in South Africa under apartheid, which was a system, apartheid literally translated from Afrikaans means separate, apart. I couldn't bear to see people suffer, and I couldn't even bear the concept of racism. I grew up under emergency restrictions, where there wasn't freedom of the press, where only the South African government could say the name Nelson Mandela and not go to jail for it. Only the South African government could, you know, talk about the African National Congress, the ruling party, and all these other things. And I knew that that was wrong. And I knew we were being lied to. And I knew it was unjust what was happening to black people in South Africa. And I was not okay with it. I wanted to understand what was happening in South Africa. I fought to get to those areas where you could see the truth. I would beg the photographers, I would beg them to take me, because nobody wanted to send a little white girl into areas where people were being hacked to death and burned alive. You know what I mean? Are you kidding? That was what I faced my whole career. I don't want to be the guy that got Laura Logan killed. I started as a journalist in South Africa when I was 17, in newspapers, and then went into television, news, and foreign media. And then I went to move to London, worked at ABC, NBC, and finally got a full-time job at CBS and got a job at 60 Minutes. My career at CBS News was very rewarding and very fulfilling, but also very hard. You know, I was not the typical correspondent. I would not stay in the hotel. I went to Baghdad, and I pretty much didn't come back for five years. I guess for me, it's not just a job. It never has been. It's about life and the world and things that really matter. And so I was 150,000 million percent committed. I was very focused on what I needed to do to learn. I went to Mozambique during the floods. I went to Afghanistan right off the 9-11. You know, I was blown up. I was shot at. I was in I don't know how many countless ambushes and firefights, most of which I never told CBS about. I couldn't tell them because they would stop me. But everything in my career changed with Benghazi. In 2012, the American embassy in Libya was attacked by Islamic insurgents. When I set out to do my 60 Minutes report on Benghazi, it was literally because I got a tip from somebody I knew very well, who was very senior in special operations. And the message was, a few American contractors were responsible for saving American lives, for bringing U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens' body back after he was murdered in the attack. Their story was unbelievable. So that's the story I set out to tell. Americans were under attack. They called for help. The State Department knew what was happening, and they ignored it. And we had one line in there where Hillary Clinton was mentioned in the final edit of the piece. I didn't know how dirty it was. What they were doing in Benghazi, none of us did. We still don't have the whole truth. But the Hillary Clinton machine, because she was so guilty of leaving Americans behind to die, because they lied about everything, they came for us with a fury. And that's when I discovered cancel culture and propagandists and political operatives, and wow, the veil was lifted. My career was never the same. Now, CBS couldn't fire me because I hadn't done anything wrong. What they subjected me to was really indescribable. I think they did it because they were hoping that I would quit. But it's fine, because they couldn't break me. They never did, and they never will. I was working for 60 Minutes with CBS. We went to Egypt right as Hosni Mubarak's regime was collapsing. You know, it was really a wild party atmosphere. You can imagine, right, decades of rule by a regime, and it's coming apart at the seams. People were jubilant on the streets. They felt that this was the people's revolution. At one point, my cameraman's light goes off, and he goes down to change the battery on the camera, and that's when our translator, young Egyptian guy, he was great. He turned to me, and he was white, and he was like, we gotta go. One of the most important things you learn is to listen to the local people, because they know more than you do. And he had heard them say things in Arabic that we didn't understand, which was what they wanted to do to me. So he was panicked, and we took off running. I was with security Ray Jackson, and I was holding onto Ray's shirt, and he kept saying to me, Lara, just hold on, do not let go, and stay on your feet, because if you go down, you're going to die. Do not go down, you're going to die. It was a mob of about 200 men, Ray wrote in his witness statement, and so I was fighting to stay on my feet, but almost immediately, I was being groped, and I could feel hands between my legs, and I was pushing them away, and they were tearing at my clothes, and tearing at my hair, tearing at my body. They tried to tear my breasts from my body, and raping me over and over, sticks, flagpoles, whatever they could, whatever they had. I really was struggling to breathe, and then I went down, and I couldn't get up anymore. I'd been fighting for my dignity, I'd been fighting the sexual violence, and I had to fight to breathe, and I thought about my children. Laura was 10 months old, and Joe was one, and I wanted to live. I was dragged into a section of the square. I fell into the arms of an Egyptian woman. This woman held me, and then they started pouring water on me. People were throwing items of clothing, because of course, I mean, I'm stripped naked. I think it was Ray who made the army come for me. They beat the mob back with batons. I mean, they had to beat their way through. That's how wild it was. So people said I was brave, but I don't think I was brave. I just knew it wasn't going to be my dirty little secret. I wasn't going to carry that in shame all my life. It didn't belong to me. The shame belongs to them. So I made that decision to talk, and when we were in the hotel room, no one could look at me. And again, I felt the shame. Like it was my shame, because you can't look at me. They took more of me than they deserved. They didn't deserve any of me, but they don't get the rest of my life. They don't get one more minute than I have to give them, and I give them less and less and less as the years go by. I mean, life is really for living. Pain is very personal, and life is hard for everybody. You can be a victim for a moment, but you can choose how long that moment lasts, and how often it comes and goes. I call it flipping the switch. I try to live in gratitude, so I can wake up every day and I can say, wow, you know, I wish I had this or, you know, so terrible this that happened to me. Or I can wake up and say, wow, I survived against all the odds. This is going to be a great day. I left CBS when my contract ended, and then I spent a year doing The Border, working on The Border for Sinclair Broadcasting. And then I did a show for Fox Nation called Lara Logan Has No Agenda, and actually that was a huge success for Fox. And I got canceled again. Then I did a show called The Rest of the Story with Lara Logan. This time, did it completely independently. I then started my own podcast, Going Rogue, with Lara Logan. I'm going to be a journalist till the day I die. I will never do anything else. I truly believe that we have a responsibility as journalists to fight for journalism, because independent media has been, you know, in many ways our salvation. Real journalism is just collapsing. I think the media is in real trouble today. We have sacrificed quality. We're losing knowledge. We're losing expertise. And most importantly, we're losing the discipline of learning real history. To people who are afraid to speak up, I would say, I understand. It's hard. But if you don't stand up and find your voice, everything you believe in is gone. We don't live in a moment where you can take a knee. Taking a knee is surrender. And the consequences of that are absolute. If we don't stand for the truth, we won't even know what the truth is. Divided, we can be picked off one by one by one. But together, we are unstoppable. Thank you so much for watching. I really hope that you enjoyed the show. And to keep PragerU videos free, please consider making a tax-deductible donation. We can't do it without you.