Young woman says she and her friends were ‘viciously attacked’ for wearing MAGA hats in Texas, but the cops blamed their hats!

There’s another controversy this morning over a girl in Texas who said she and her friends wore MAGA hats to a club in Austin earlier this month and were ‘viciously attacked’ for wearing them.

The controversy lies in the details of what really happened and how the cops suggested she was partially to blame for wearing the hat…or something.

Here’s the story:

YAHOO LIFESTYLE – Haley Maddox posted a video last Saturday to recount an incident she says took place in Austin, Texas, on March 2. Maddox is wearing a red MAGA cap and has a black eye in the video; according to her Instagram posts, the injury stems from the alleged March 2 attack. Other posts reference a leg injury and claim that she “almost died” supporting Trump.

“On Saturday night me and my girlfriends were viciously attacked by an entire bar of people, men and women included, for wearing MAGA hats,” she says in the video. “We did not go in with the intentions of starting a fight. We were just wearing our MAGA hats out on a Saturday and we wanted to show our support for Texas Independence week.

“We asked one of the bartenders to help us and he ended up choking out one of my friends,” she alleges.

Maddox says that after leaving the bar and calling the cops “another random man came and attacked us again — all over our hats.”

She goes on to slam the Austin Police Department for not taking the matter seriously.

“[They] showed bias, in our opinion, towards us because we were Trump supporters and insinuated that this happened because we wore those hats,” she says.

She adds that her friends “support the cops” but “want justice” after feeling that their alleged attack was not properly investigated.

Here’s the main video of Maddox retelling what happened from Instagram:

 
But another girl claims Maddox really just got into a drunken fight and says she has the video to prove it. The video is recorded outside of the bar and shows Maddox arguing with cops over their suggestion that she did something wrong:

Here’s that video and it runs about 20 minutes:

I watched a few minutes of the video. At the very beginning, one of the cops does say something peculiar to Maddox, which sets her off for the rest of the video.

First, the Austin police officer tells her that unless an assault happens in their presence, there isn’t much they can do except take a report.

But then it gets weird when the cop says this:

“The second thing is that while you’re allowed to wear these hats down here — because we deal with this often, okay? — once it starts inciting riotous behavior, then it becomes a crime.”

I had the same reaction in my head that she had in the video: WHOA! It’s just a hat!

The cop then proceeds to clarify his statement, comparing this situation to a woman walking around topless, which is apparently legal in Austin:

“It’s just like a woman is allowed to walk around down here with a shirt off. Once it starts causing a disturbance, that’s when it becomes illegal.”

I’m not sure that helped me at all. Again, just like Maddox says in the video, it’s just a hat.

Another cop tries to clarify it again to one of Maddox’s friends, suggesting that the hats have nothing to do with it. He says that once there is a disturbance, Maddox and her friends can’t then escalate the disturbance. He says ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’.

The girl then explains to the officer that she started recording because she could hear the raised voices and noticed it was starting to get heated. Apparently the man that was filming didn’t like it and was apparently trying to hide his face and then ‘knocked it’. I assume she means he hit the camera, but she could mean that he hit them. It’s not clear.

The cop then argues that it’s almost like they are harassing the man because he was already starting to walk away and they kept recording him. Again, he says ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’.

The video just goes downhill from there. As I noted above, Maddox was set off by the first statement by the cop and that continues throughout the video. Maddox clearly feels the cops too easily dismissed their claims because they were wearing MAGA hats.

I’d love to see what you guys think about all of this.


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