Back in February, when Eric Hunt was arrested for assaulting Elie Wiesel, the SF Chronicle painted a pretty nasty picture.
Hunt is a Holocaust denier who in recent weeks traveled to Florida in an unsuccessful attempt to confront Wiesel at a conference there, said Lt. Dan Mahoney, head of special investigations for San Francisco police. Hunt began following Holocaust denial organizations after graduating from college, and although he used the Internet to spread his beliefs, authorities believe Hunt acted alone.
"He appears to be what we call a lone wolf,'' Mahoney said.
Five days after Wiesel was attacked, a man identifying himself as Hunt posted a detailed account of the crime on several anti-Semitic and anti-Israel Web sites. That account matched a description of the attack police provided a few days later. In the online post, Hunt said he cornered Wiesel, the author of more than 40 books based on his Holocaust experiences, to force him into admitting that the Holocaust never occurred.
So AP's puff piece on Hunt's "apology" today during his preliminary hearing came as quite a shock.
Hunt raised a shaking hand and spoke up suddenly from his seat next to his lawyer just as Wiesel had finished describing his ordeal in Nazi death camps, where his parents and sister died.
"Mr. Wiesel, I'm sorry for scaring you and I'm sorry you experienced the Holocaust," Hunt said. "My grandfather fought the Nazis and I'm sorry about what happened."
Wiesel did not respond but went on to describe the Feb. 1 incident in which he said Hunt grabbed him from the elevator and demanded that the 78-year-old professor come to his room for an interview. Wiesel said he feared he was being kidnapped and began shouting for help in the empty hallway on the hotel's sixth floor.
"The shock to me was so great I lost a sense of time and of space," said Wiesel, who was not injured.
Hunt, of Vernon, New Jersey, has been in a San Francisco jail psychiatric ward since May, when he was flown to California to face the charges.
His lawyer, San Francisco defense attorney John Runfola, said in an interview Monday that prosecutors had "overcharged" his client.
Runfola said Hunt was not an anti-Semitic stalker, but a man suffering from mental illness. When he confronted Wiesel, he was in the grip of a "manic episode" triggered by his grandfather's death, he said.
The defense has sent the results of a psychiatrist's evaluation to Wiesel along with 20 letters from Hunt's family, friends and teachers describing the incident as deeply out of character for the high school honor student and college graduate, Runfola said.
"I'm hoping that in (Wiesel's) lifelong struggle to help oppressed people, he reaches out to one of them, and that's Eric Hunt," Runfola said.
Period. End of article. Compare and contrast to today's SF Chronicle account. Let's hope the judge has sufficient access to the facts to see through this BS.
