“If Michael Bennett truly wants to make the world a better place, making fake allegations of racism makes the relationship between minorities and police that much worse.”
Clay Travis thinks it’s time the Seattle Pro-Bowler come clean about that fateful night of August 26th, when Bennett alleged he was nearly executed by police in the streets for ‘doing nothing more than simply being a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time’, as Bennett described.
Although it may have been a harrowing tale of prejudice and injustice, Travis says it was ultimately a tall tale riddled in fiction, from a guy looking to attain further notoriety as a commentator on social justice, as Bennett is set to publish a memoir titled “How to Make White People Uncomfortable” in 2018.
After TMZ released a video of Las Vegas police detaining Bennett, which included three police officers, two Hispanic, and one African-American, it was revealed that police had explained to Bennett that there were reports of a shooting in the area, and when told to get down while he hid behind a slot machine, Bennett was the only individual in the vicinity who then started sprinting away, which caused police to assume he may have been the culprit. The story Bennett had originally described, one he claimed had him fearing for his life, stated that he was racially profiled and only detained because he was black.
Travis says Bennett seemed to conveniently leave out that the officers who detained him were three minority police officers and that that were hundreds of other black people in the area at the time. In the TMZ video Bennett even acknowledges the officers’ reasoning for detaining him and shakes hands with one of the officers after a short, but rational exchange.
“The police reviewed 190 different videos and found no evidence to support any of Michael Bennett’s accusations,” Travis said. “As a result, they released all these videos on Friday, told Michael Bennett and his attorneys, ‘you can have access to all 190+ of these videos'... no response whatsoever.”
Travis says for the amount of attention the story originally garnered a day before the NFL season on September 6th, when Bennett shared a lengthy post on his Twitter account titled ‘Equality’, there doesn’t seem to be any follow-ups from the mainstream media on the same story that now seems incredibly fabricated.
“100% proven to not be true. Did they get any coverage at all about the fact that Michael Bennett was a liar or these accusations were unfair, and falsely portrayed these three minority officers at the Las Vegas police department as racist? Nope! Not any coverage at all.”
Travis says much like Ryan Lochte did after his story of being dragged out of a taxi and being robbed at gunpoint in last year’s Olympic Games in Brazil was deemed to be heavily exaggerated, Bennett needs to also admit that things got crazy and he misremembered what really happened.
"He could easily apologize. If you wanted to defend Michael Bennett you could say ‘look, he was involved in a scary situation', a lot of times eyewitnesses are not reliable, your mind gets ahead of what actually happens, and you could say, ‘Now that I’ve reviewed these videosm I don’t think the police mistreated me. I apologize for the allegations that I’ve made’. He could easily come back and make this right.”
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