Columnist apologized for referring to column that never was
This is an apology from Rocky Mountain News columnist Bill Johnson. It was published back on September 2, 2005. A reader recently sent it in to us.
She existed. It appears I just never wrote about her earlier. A reader
pointed this out recently and challenged me to acknowledge it.
Here it is.
The woman appeared in a column here in July. A woman I encountered
holding a large picture of a dead fetus during an abortion protest in
Denver that week closely resembled a woman I had encountered some 13
years ago in California.
Every day for nearly two years a woman would stand outside an abortion
clinic in Fullerton, holding the same type of photographs. One day, I
pulled over on my way to work to ask the simple question: Why?
She screamed at me then, threatened to kill me if I didn’t get away,
and later called and e-mailed me at the paper multiple times to call me
evil.
I mistakenly wrote six weeks ago that I had written of that long ago
episode in another newspaper. If that column does exist, I cannot find
it.
My July column was not an attempt to mislead or, as the astute reader
contended, to lie. It was a remembrance of a terrible past episode that
quite closely mirrored a more recent one.
Knucklehead.
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