At the time, she said, she had no doubt she was about to die.
Warning: This item deals with violent sexual assault and may be distressing for some readers.
It was February 2011. 60 Minutes reporter Lara Logan was reporting on the Arab Spring and the toppling of former President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
Logan, a married mother of two, was separated from her bodyguard and camera crew and attacked by a mob of men.
She was gang-raped, leaving her with injuries that led to repeated hospitalised with complications from the internal assaults.
Logan has now made her comeback, with reports she has just signed a new two-year deal with CBS News in the US.
The Daily Mail reports that in 2014 her original CBS News contract was said to be worth $1million per year, but her new salary has not been divulged.
Logan spoke about the brutal attack in a US 60 Minutes interview later that year:
“There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying. I thought not only am I going to die, but it’s going to be just a torturous death that’s going to go on forever,” she said.
She said at the time she spoke out to break a “code of silence” she said that exists around sexual violence against women. She said she wanted people to know what happened to her.
“I don’t want to make it sound worse than it was, or better than it was, or to minimise it or sensationalise it, just call it what it was,” she said. “This is what happens to women and it’s wrong.”
Logan says she heard later that the mob of men were chanting “Let’s take her pants off”.
She says at that moment the Egyptian fixer looked at her and said “we’ve got to get out of here”.