Brian Williams’ Wednesday night apology for his repeated Iraq War story that many called false has only inspired others to dig into the NBC Nightly News anchor’s past. Now, his stories about his experiences in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina are being targeted.
One of Williams’ stories about his time in New Orleans during the devastating hurricane included an incident in which he saw a body floating in the French Quarter from his five-star hotel. However, The New Orleans Advocate notes that the French Quarter was one area of the city that actually remained mostly dry.
Williams also claimed that he spent the night of the storm in the Superdome.
“When you look out of your hotel window in the French Quarter and watch a man float by face down, when you see bodies that you last saw in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, and swore to yourself that you would never see in your country,” Williams, 55, said during a 2006 interview with Michael Eisner.
In another story from Katrina, Williams claims he got dysentery during his reporting there, notes The Daily News. He told that story just last year during an interview with Tom Brokaw.
“I accidentally ingested some of the flood water. I became very sick with dysentery,” Williams told Brokaw, his predecessor on NBC Nightly News. “Our hotel was overrun with gangs. I was rescued in the stairwell of a five-star hotel in New Orleans by a young police officer. We are friends to this day. I look back at total agony. We were experiencing the least of it.”
In a 2007 C-SPAN interview, he claimed that “men with guns” followed him one night while in downtown New Orleans because his crew was the only light source. “We were told not to drink our bottled water in front of people because we could get killed for it,” he said.
While a Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals spokeswoman told the Advocate that dysentery isn’t a disease they track, she did say that contaminated water could have resulted in dysentery. However, Dr. Brobson Lutz. who was in an EMS trailer, told the Advocate, “I saw a lot of people with cuts and bruises and such, but I don’t recall a single, solitary case of gastroenteritis during Katrina or in the whole month afterward.”
Earlier this week, Williams was forced to admit that he made a “mistake” by telling a story about being in a helicopter during the Iraq War that was hit by an RPG in 2003. However, it was found that it was a lie he repeated several times, as recently as 2013 in an interview with David Letterman.
image via B. Ach/INFevents.com