Kenneth J. Timmerman - Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary and Obama Blamed for Benghazi

CHAPTER 3

BESIEGED BY THE MEDIA

Cindy gave an initial telephone interview to Gawker, a Hollywood tip sheet, where she talked in some detail about the lines she had been given to read on set and the words that eventually got dubbed over her voice. I had nothing to do really with anything, she told the reporter. Now we have people dead because of a movie I was in. It makes me sick Im going to sue his butt off, she added.

That was her gut reaction. Everybody seemed to sue everybody in California.

Cindy joined approximately 80 members of the cast and crew in a statement they sent to CNN and other news outlets, denouncing the film and claiming they had been misled by the producer. So when CNN called the next day, Thursday, September 13, Cindy wasnt surprised. She agreed to meet Miguel Marquez in the lobby of a hotel near her home in Bakersfield, CA.

She is horrified at what happened, Marquez said, oozing sympathy to on-air host Erin Burnett. The only reason she went on camera is because she was horrified at what happened. Cindy told him she was angry with the filmmaker and believed she and other cast members had been misled. There was no discussion of Mohammad during the film, he said. She made a small, low-budget film and finds herself now at the center of an international nightmare.

To prove her point, Cindy took a copy of the few pages of script she had been able to locate. They all identified the main character as George, Master George, but never Mohammad. She had wanted to show those pages during the interview so everyone in America could see she was innocent and had not spoken the lines attributed to her, but CNN never broadcasted that part of the interview, only a 15-second clip of her denouncing the filmmaker and appearing to make an abject apology to Muslims.

I would never been involved in a film that would bring harm to anyone, she said. It makes me sick to my stomach to think I was involved in that movie that brought death to those people. I think its very unfair. I am very sorry for that man and his family and everybody else who was hurt. She appeared to be sobbing by the end of the segment.

Initially, Cindy had intended to do just that one TV interview. But instead of calming the storm, the CNN piece had just the opposite effect. Within hours, television news trucks blocked the street outside her house in Bakersfield and reporters were pounding on the door. She agreed to meet with a reporter from the Bakersfield Californian , which posted a brief video of the interview online. Cindy repeated what she had told CNN. Its not me stating those words about Mohammad, the founder of Islam. She had been misled. Everything else in that YouTube, I never saw, she
insisted. But clearly, she was beginning to have second thoughts, and volunteered that the producer had called her back on March 2, 2012 to overdub her voice, because it hadnt come out right in the initial shoot.

Cindy became so exhausted with all the media attention she just wanted to shut it all out. At one point, she collapsed on the sofa and her husband went to the door and told the reporters to leave her alone. When several of them got angry, because they had traveled quite far to stake out the house, he told them to go rent a room and come back the next day, which they did. This went on for days.

Angry Muslim men started calling her at home and said vulgar things about her and her family, threatening to kill them because they had insulted Islam. Who are these people? she thought. How can they say such horrible things? One of them threatened to rape her. Another described how he intended to sodomize her. Yet another said he would cut her head off and put it on a pole. Men called up saying they would rape her children and anybody who worked with her. Another man suggested that she murder the producer if she wanted to save her own life.

Then the threats started coming in over her personal Facebook page and pages she operated for her Christian ministry, from users with screen names like Assasin Junglee, Ali Abdulrehman, LionZaid Hamid, Ahmad Masanawa, Ahmed Batni, Hani Reda, Xaadi Mian, and many others. Cindy, perhaps mistakenly, tried to respond to them, using reason and the love of Christ she felt in her heart. They only responded with more hatred, and with a sexual vulgarity I will not reproduce here.

A few days later, she got a call from a producer at an Arabic-language TV station, who said their network was widely viewed in Egypt. Because Sam had told her he had wanted to show the movie in Egypt, Cindy felt she owed them an answer to what had really happened with the film, so she agreed to come to their studio. As she drove the freeway over the Grapevine, the mountain range separating Bakersfield from Los Angeles to the south, she thought of all the threats against her and took her .38 Special from the glove compartment and tucked it into her pants. Thank God for concealed carry, she thought.

Along the way, she prayed, asking the Lord for wisdom. I do not know these people or what they are about. Lord, please help me to understand their hearts. And as she drove along, she felt a powerful recollection, as if the breath of the Holy Spirit had come over her, reminding her of the story of Abraham and his two sons, the first with an Egyptian slave woman, Hagar, because his wife Sarai had been unable able to conceive; and then, late in life, through Gods miracle, a second son with his lawful wife.

It was that second son, Isaac, who received Abrahams blessing and became the father of Israel. But the first-born, Ishmael, became an outcast. As the angel of the Lord warned Sarai,

He will be a wild donkey of a man;

His hand will be against everyone

And everyones hand be against him,

And he will live in hostility

Toward all his brothers. [Genesis 16:11-12]

Cindy knew those verses well and had preached on them at her church. As she drove down to Los Angeles over the Grapevine, they repeated them over and over again. Why? She wondered. Why am I thinking of this now?

And then it hit her. This was the story of the Middle East today, an unending war between two brothers from the same father and different mothers, and she started to weep uncontrollably. I have two children from two different fathers, but that does not mean that I love one more than the other, she thought. She felt her heart was bursting with unfamiliar emotions, and it frightened her. And then, almost in comic relief, she thought, get a grip on yourself, or youre going to have to pull over and youll be late for the interview.

The interview with Middle East Broadcasting in Los Angeles went well. A female assistant producer escorted her into a private room and placed her in front of a microphone and a camera and seemed to connect her to the Middle East, where a female interpreter was translating her words in real time so the audience could understand what she was saying. She felt they treated her with dignity and respect, the first time in fact she had felt that in the interviews she had given. Something of the peace of Christ had come down upon her while she was driving, and she managed to hold onto it during the interview.

She repeated what she had been saying all along. The producer had deceived her and the other members of the cast. I never mentioned the name of Mohammed, I never heard the name of Mohammed except when I saw the clip, trailer, and I never understood what they were trying to do. None of it made sense to me, she said.

She also mentioned that the producer said that he was from Israel. It was the type of statement that fed into the deep-held belief among Muslims of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy. But Cindy was too wrapped up in trying to keep her world from collapsing around her to realize the impact of what she was saying, even though she now knew it wasnt true and had told Gawker earlier in the week that Sam had told her on set that he was Egyptian. She felt that by apologizing to the people who were getting hurt she could put an end to the negative media attention. She thought she could wash away the tremendous burden of guilt she felt for the deaths in Benghazi. And she was confused. The death threats were scaring her.