Justin Katz called it early.  Bill Bartholomew’s extremely clipped video of Jeann Lugo striking Jennifer Rourke at the State House melee Friday night is a serious disservice to the truth.

Bartholomew’s clipped video doesn’t show what happened leading up to that moment.

So you don’t see Jennifer Rourke laying hands on Jeann Lugo.  Without his consent, in a harmful and offensive manner.

You don’t see Rourke pulling on Lugo repeatedly, impeding him from protecting a victim of assault.

You don’t see that Lugo is faced away from Rourke most of the time, focused on protecting someone, so has no idea who is pulling on him and impeding him – has no idea their identity; their gender; their race.

You don’t see that he turns and “neutralizes” – strikes – whoever is stopping him from protecting the assault victim without noticing or caring about their identity; their gender; their race.

Now more video has surfaced – this one, for example, taken by WPRO’s Tom Quinlan – where we can see all of this for ourselves.

But it is way too late now.  What quickly circulated nationally thanks to Bartholomew’s very clipped video is the completely false story that a man struck a woman; a white cop struck a black person; a male candidate for public office struck his female opponent – out of the blue, for no reason.

Bartholomew has repeatedly stated, by way of trying to exonerate himself from posting the very clipped, very inaccurate video, that he posted his own full video of the incident on his Twitter feed. Yeah, it’s there.  If you spend the time to dig back far enough, you’ll find it.

Fascinating that Bartholomew chose to pin the extremely clipped rather than the full video to the top of his Twitter feed.

And far from exonerating him, the existence of his full video actually incriminates him.  Because what he could have done is shared his full video with a comment along the lines, “At minute XX:XX, it appears @JeannCLugo strikes his Senate opponent @JenRourke29”.

That would have been honest and helpful.  That would have permitted the world to see the whole incident, including what led up to Lugo striking Rourke.

Instead, Bartholomew created a video so short and so inaccurate, it is a lie.  And the “lie” went viral, was picked up by every news outlet under the sun, was viewed millions of times and thereby created a false narrative of what happened.

Of course, Jeann Lugo should press assault charges against Jennifer Rourke.  As should the man whom she is clearly seen shoving in the video.

But Jeann Lugo should also sue Bill Bartholomew for defamation.  Bartholomew’s extremely clipped video has seriously endangered Lugo’s opportunity for justice.  And it is clearly grounds for a defamation suit because it has harmed his reputation and cast him personally in a negative light by creating a completely false narrative of the incident that night.

I would further argue that Lugo actually has an obligation to file suit because such litigation is a righteous and powerful way of discouraging the future creation of such false, harmful videos, particularly by people who reach for stepped up credibility by conferring on themselves the title of Journalist – something that, remarkably, Bill Bartholomew does.

[Featured Image Credit: screenshot from Tom Quinlan’s video of the melee.]