Conflicting 911 reports seem to debunk a Republican Virginia state Senate candidate’s claim that she and her 12-year-old daughter were attacked by Black Lives Matter demonstrators in 2020.
Police records show that while she complained about protesters harassing her, multiple people identified her as an aggressor, taunting the group by apparently driving her car into the crowd.
This new finding, made public after Huffington Post journalist Jen Bendery filed a Freedom of Information request for the calls, presents a very different narrative than what Tara Durant has been pushing as she seeks an elected office.
Durant, a current member of the Virginia House of Delegates, claims that she was a victim.
“I got in politics a few years ago because, as many of you know my story, that the personal safety of my daughter and me were threatened. That has been a key issue in my campaign because we saw what became the ‘defund the police’ movement,” Durant said in a debate in September 2023.
The allegation picked up steam and became a viral story that many right-wing media outlets like Fox repeated, pushing the idea that the BLM movement was violent and poised to assault good Americans. Carlson Tucker, who had a show on the network, said a “violent mob” was chasing Durant and her daughter, and this was one example of how many in the country felt “intentionally abandoned by the state that promised to protect them” during the 2020 summer of civic unrest.
But Bendery’s report paints a different picture of what happened to the conservative provocateur.
The police report, based on what Bendery received, described the protest as peaceful, noting there were “no arrests or property damage.”
Also, in her 911 call, Durant tells the operator she is prepared to run protesters over. When she is told by the officer on the line not to hit any of the people she sees at the…
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