Actress Jamie Lee Curtis has apologized for making a “snap judgment” about the encounter between a Native American elder and a group of Catholic boys, saying she should have known better than to “judge a book by its cover.”
“There are two sides to every story,” she tweeted Sunday. “I made a snap judgment based on a photograph & I know better than to judge a book by its cover. I wasn’t there. I shouldn’t have commented. I’m glad there wasn’t violence. I hope these two men can meet and find common ground as can WE ALL!”
She also suggested that President Trump host Omaha elder Nathan Phillips and Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann for root beers, similar to the “beer summit” that President Barack Obama held with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and the Boston police officer who arrested him in 2009.
Ms. Curtis was referring to the outcry over Friday’s encounter between Mr. Phillips and Covington Catholic students, who were accused of taunting and harassing the 63-year-old man at the Lincoln Memorial.
Her original tweet appeared to have been deleted from her Twitter feed.
Students and adults affiliated with the school trip to the 46th annual March for Life have since insisted that Mr. Phillips, singing and beating a drum, made his way into a cheer circle formed by the students, and that the teenage boys were not taunting him.
Comments on her post were mixed, with some congratulating her for being fair-minded and others insisting she had been “bamboozled,” noting that some of the boys were wearing Make America Great Again hats.
Mr. Sandmann issued a statement saying he was trying to defuse a tense situation that began when a handful of Black Hebrew Israelite members shouted racial and homophobic epithets at the students before Mr. Phillips approached them.
Ms. Curtis linked to a section of Mr. Sandmann’s statement in which he said that he was “startled and confused” when Mr. Phillips and several other adults initiated contact with the student group.
“We had already been yelled at by another group of protestors, and when the second group approached I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers,” said Mr. Sandmann, who was accused of smirking at Mr. Phillips in their face-to-face encounter.
A large group of students from the Catholic school was waiting for a bus to return to Kentucky. The Diocese of Covington issued a statement Sunday apologizing for the students’ actions and saying it would take “appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.”
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