Music Good afternoon, Michael Malice here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. You guys are in for a real treat because our guest today is Lara Logan. Lara currently hosted going Rugg podcast. You are a longtime reporter for CBS news. Things got ugly. they gave you the door, you left, everyone, to tell it. I have discovered a new way of trolling and I'm gonna do it for you right now. And that is giving people sincere compliments and it makes them very uncomfortable and then everyone gets to laugh at their discomfort. Here we go. When I met you at our friend Jake's party, you sat there and you talked my ear off and everything you said was so interesting and articulate and insightful that I was sitting there like, what's his name? Wanting more gruel? Like I just like I could. Yeah, I'll retwist. And there was so much you were telling me over so many topics. I'm like, I have to get her on my show.

Just off the top of my head, just when people tell you things that are like, you feel stupid, they're so obvious. Like one thing you talked about, you had done a piece or been involved in a piece that a lot of fair amount of firefighters are arsonists. And it makes perfect sense, because you think about like with people who pray on kids, It's gonna be teachers because every animal knows

to go where the prey is.

It's just, right.

So of course, if I'm someone who's attracted to

f***. And it makes perfect sense because you think about like with people who pray on kids, it's going to be teachers because every animal knows to go where they pray is.

It's just right. So of course, if I'm someone who's attracted to fire, I'm going to be in a job. And it's just so I don't even know where we're going to start because you were just saying so many interesting things. I guess that's not with your shoes because I remember you were wearing some funky shoes at that party. I have a lot of funky shoes.

That's true.

Was I wearing my American flag ones?

No, they were orange. Oh, the shining. Yes. Yeah, yeah. They were shining. Because you want you up. Should I tell the story of our first conversation? Yes. You should that horrific story. Okay. Okay. So people often wonder what I'm like in real life. And I knew your name. I didn't have to top my head remember your backstory, in my defense. And I was telling the story of a group of people, and I was saying how I just got out of the Palm Beach airport. And then that'll detect your set off my front and my back and the guy, I go, okay, go ahead and

meet me. And the guy exhaled with frustration and he called over to supervisor and they stared at me and they had a conversation, the surprise goes, would you like a private conversation area, sir? I go, no, no, you call me in public. And again, they were like annoyed that I wasn't gleeful about this and they did their duty and whatever and do you know what you said? I vaguely but I'm gonna let you take it away, deliver the punchline. Well you said a lot of know that I really called that situation and I go what do you mean? And you said, well I was gangst in size and beaten almost a death by a mob of 200 men. Yes. You didn't say that.

Exactly.

And I stood there for a second and you had a pleasant temperament. It wasn't hostile. And I'm like, what do I do? So the only thing I knew to do is to double down. And I said, yes, but it's happened to me. Yes, that's right. That's right. It's interesting. you bring that up because one of the things before we get into political stuff is how are you in a position where you could discuss something that's extremely traumatic and not have it, have PTSD or even laugh about it? Because this is something I think a lot of people have to go through not to that level, but how do you get to that point where you have a healthy relationship with something so awful? Well, very simply, I learned from another survivor of who said at the trial of the two men who slid her throat and gutted her and hurriededly. And she was a South African woman. She has an amazing book, her name is Alison Boerter. And she was asked at her trial by the judge, how can you be so strong? Because, you know, she was rusted into emergency surgery and they had to stitch her back together and she was giving the description to the police as all this happened. I was a young reporter then in South Africa and I never forget her answer on the stand. She said, they took so much from me that night. Why would I give them the rest of my life? Oh my God, what a beautiful quote.

Yeah, I wish I could pretend it was mine, but that would be theft and fraud. Yeah, and that's not what I do. So yeah, I learned from Allison. And you know what's funny? I stored that in the back of my memory because I was 37 when I was uh, gang, and you know, obviously that's a, you know, 15 or so years later. And that's how I felt.

But I think for me, I was so close to death.

And I had been forced to, I've been confronted by my own limitations. I know there was nothing more that I could do to survive. And so that began a process of accepting my death, but also fighting for my children to know that I didn't just give up. And so when I was actually rescued, which just looked like it was by, it was a miracle that I survived that. And I never wanted to waste that time. It's just an incredible thing. When your children, my daughter was one in my, no, my daughter was 10 months old and my son was one. And I was really filled with terrible, terrible guilt at knowing that they were going to grow up without a mother. And so when I got to live, that was the thing that consumed me more than anything else. I looked at those little babies and I, you know, I just got on my knees and I thanked God that I was still there. So I didn't want to waste a moment of that. Plus, I was loved all my life.

You know, I had a wise mother and a wise father. I didn't have an idyllic upbringing.

My parents were divorced and all that. But, um, but I still had, I had love and wisdom.

And then, of course, you know, I had a miracle of God. Um, I don't know how that plays with your audience, but it is the truth. It is just the truth is that it wasn't my time. It wasn't my moment. And honestly, I came, I've made my peace with it. I think one of the things I learned in that process, Michael, was that we put this pressure on ourselves to prove to everybody, I'm the same as I was before this happened, right? And what is built into that? Because I had to prove to everyone at 60 minutes, I can go back to work, you know, I'm the same as I was. And then I realized many months later that I was trying to live up to a standard that doesn't actually exist. You're never the same. I mean, you can fall in love. You're not the same. Your heart gets broken. You're not the same. You lose an animal pet that you love. Whatever it is, you get married. You get divorced. All these things change us. And so, for me, it was a process of discovering that healing is really about peace. You can't change what happened to you. You can't erase it. You cannot go back to who you were before, but you can make peace with who you become. And you can make peace with what happened to you. And I also never had any anger or rage. I just didn't care about the men who did that to me because I had lived long enough to know that good things, bad things happened to very good people all the time. All the time I witnessed many things like that and I reported on it. In fact, part of my reason for being is to tell the stories of good people who are forced to endure terrible things and the hope that somehow it would be made right. So I had that knowledge and that certainty. and knew very much who I was as a person and And so I was given a lot and I'm not a person who looks I am a person who tries to live in gratitude. I try to be conscious of all the blessings that I have and it's taken me a long Time to learn that lesson of being as grateful for your trials as for your blessings You know, That's always a work in progress, right? But if you can get there, it's a very peaceful place. That's sort of how I live my life. I'm just very grateful that my children still have me all these years later because it didn't – I was dying in that square and it took a miracle to save me. Yeah. A good friend of mine named Matt and he asked me to use his name when I went in Rogan because he told me that he had been the victim of childhood abuse of a certain kind from a neighboring boy and the point I try to talk about this as much as possible is for people it gets a disservice for those who haven't had that happen that they have to keep their mouth shut and hide in the secret and deal with it where it's like it's happening for the rest of their lives where it's like no, no, no, I told ice treat him exactly the same. I don't think first of all it can never happen again because he's an adult so in a literal sense it can never happen. But second, like to kind of reconcile this isn't this happened the past. This is not who you are. You are someone who has a life and has choices and this doesn't make some you bad in any way.

And when I This isn't this happened the past. This is not who you are. You are someone who has a life and has choices

and this doesn't make you bad in any way. And when I talked about Unrogan, and again, I bring it up whenever I can because it's something I feel so passionately about. So many other of my friends and strangers on social media, you know, said, you know, I never told anyone this. And I think it's so healthy. That's what happens. Yeah, I think you have a right just a few feet away from me here in the studio.

I have a huge box filled with tens of thousands of letters that people that wrote to me after I talked about this publicly and many of them from men. And that was I was really touched by that, you know, because I realized it made me realize how much harder it is for men to talk about being sexually abused and assaulted, even violently, right? And that was, that I think is a kind of a gift from God, is that he opened that door to me, that I can speak to people, and I understand what Matt means, because I knew that night that I was not going to carry this as my dirty little secret. secret. I knew that I was going to speak about it, but why? Because the Egyptian soldiers who beat their way through the mob to get to me when I went down for the last time and I couldn't get up again, they wouldn't touch me when I was naked. So they left and they went to get an abaya which is the black,

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