Fox News correspondent Jesse Watters is usually the one who surprises people with unscheduled on-camera interviews — but he apparently found himself on the other side of such a confrontation at an afterparty following the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night.
He didn’t seem to like it one bit.
During a fancy MSNBC-hosted afterparty that stretched into the early-morning hours of Sunday, a physical altercation broke out between Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grim and Watters, considered by many of his colleagues to be an “ambush” reporter.
Grim told TheBlaze he approached Watters with his cellphone camera recording and pressed him about his past confrontation of reporter Amanda Terkel in 2009. Terkel claimed Watters “followed,” “harassed,” and “ambushed” her while she was on vacation in Winchester, Va.
Watters first snatched the reporter’s cellphone and “threw it about 10 feet,” according to Grim. When he returned with the camera still recording, Grim said Watters then snatched his phone and put it in his pocket.
It was only when Watters apparently refused to return the phone that things got physical between the two tuxedo-wearing journalists.
“I expected him to handle it a lot better since he does this for a living,” Grim told TheBlaze. “He put my phone in his pocket and repeatedly refused to return it. I warned him I would take it back, and eventually did.”
When asked just how physical the scuffle got, Grim would only say that it was “broken up quickly” by bystanders. However, a witness told The Washington Post “punches were definitely thrown.”
A short video apparently showing the tail-end of the scuffle emerged online Sunday:
@jason_howerton @ryangrim @jessebwatters Heres a short clip of the end of it pic.twitter.com/iTFM2kPWUt
— Cassandra Fairbanks (@CassandraRules) May 1, 2016
A Fox News spokesperson told TheBlaze that Watters planned to address the incident on “The O’Reilly Factor” Monday, but did not elaborate further.
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