Sometimes you just have to see it to believe it.
Marc Lamont Hill, a CUNY professor of urban education and longtime cable news analyst, appeared on the June 11 episode of “The Joe Budden Podcast” this week and shared an anecdote about the time he was pepper-sprayed. The host and his friends weren’t buying it, suspecting that if Hill was sprayed, it must’ve been by a scorned woman.
The next day, the video of the incident surfaced, and it supports Hill’s version of events.
Hill is speaking at an event in his native Philadelphia on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2024. There was a Q&A session in which a young woman asked him about the “sexual abuse I’ve encountered.”
He tells her he is unaware. She begins approaching him slowly, then, picking up her pace, she gets just a few feet from Hill and begins spraying in his face. Hill is knocked back out of his chair and rushes backstage as the woman is tackled by two security personnel.
“She had been stalking me for a couple of weeks,” Hill said on the Budden podcast.
She had written him a letter detailing how the CIA, with the help of then-President Joe Biden, had framed her for murder, Hill said.
A few weeks earlier, she was caught by police spray-painting Hill’s Philadelphia bookstore, with a brick in her purse. She was not arrested, Hill said.
Hill said he recognized her name when she stood up to ask her question at the MLK Day event. In the video, he can be seen signaling to someone offstage, presumably security.
When she approached him and pulled something from her purse, “I’m thinking she’s reaching for a gun,” Hill said. Instead, it’s her keys, where the little container of pepper spray was attached.
Hill did not press charges and, in a post published Thursday morning on X, he shared what’s happened since.
“I have worked with her family and community members to enable a restorative process,” he wrote. “Through the process, I have learned that she did indeed suffer significant childhood abuse, as well as serious mental health challenges that continue to this day. Instead of criminal prosecution, I have done my best to make sure that she receives social and mental health support to help her heal as best as possible.”
On social media, commenters threw deep shade on Budden and his co-hosts while commending Hill for setting them straight. Many applaud him for his empathy.
“Respect, Marc. That is more empathy than most people would show in this situation, and shows a real depth of character,” one person wrote. “Great people can see that Marc continues to practice what he preaches,” another X follower wrote.
