Don Lemon recounted what led up to and followed his arrest, including the moment no one actually knew where he was, during a lengthy interview with Jimmy Kimmel on Monday night.
The former CNN anchor was arrested in Los Angeles on Thursday while covering the Grammys. The longtime critic of President Donald Trump is accused of conspiracy and hampering the First Amendment rights of worshippers following his coverage of an anti-ICE protest last month at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota. He denies the allegations, saying he was operating as a journalist.
As Trump-aligned figures increasingly hyped Lemon’s reporting as criminal, Lemon told Kimmel he retained an attorney and offered to cooperate with authorities well before the arrest.
The attorney said, per Lemon, ”‘If you are serious about this, let’s do it the right way. He’s perfectly willing to self-report,’ which means turn yourself in. ‘And so we don’t have to go through this whole rigmarole,’” Lemon recalled. But Lemon said his legal representative “never heard back from them.”
“People who are accused of much worse things than I am accused of doing, they are allowed the courtesy,” said Lemon, contrasting the treatment he received with that afforded to President Donald Trump, who was “allowed the courtesy to turn himself in.”
Lemon later described the night of his arrest.
After returning from a Spotify party, he said he was waiting for an elevator at his hotel when “all of a sudden I feel myself being jostled and people trying to grab me and put me in handcuffs.”
He continued: “I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ They said, ‘We came to arrest you.’ And I said, ‘Who are you?’ Finally, they identified themselves, and I said, ‘If you are who you are, then where’s the warrant?’ And they didn’t have a warrant. So, they had to wait for someone from outside, an FBI guy to come in, to show me a warrant on a cell phone.”
Watch the full interview here:
“I dropped all my stuff, my glasses had fallen on the floor. I’m like, ‘I can’t read that [the warrant].’ So they had to pick my glasses up and I read it. Still, what does that mean?” said Lemon.
He thought there were “maybe a dozen people” involved in the arrest — something he called “a waste of resources because I had told them weeks before, maybe once or twice … that I could just go in.”
Instead, Lemon said, “They want that, they want to embarrass you.”
He added, “They want to instill fear. And so that’s why they did it that way.”
Lemon said he was held in a holding room from midnight until around 1 p.m. the following day. He said he was denied his one phone call and said he was told, “You get to talk to your attorney whenever the court says you can.”
But, still wearing his Apple Watch, he said he tried to call his husband and attorney, but both calls went to voicemail. Eventually placed, handcuffed, in an FBI agent’s truck, he said agents offered to remove his diamond wedding bracelet because it was hurting him.
Lemon asked if they could take it up to his husband’s hotel room. “One of the FBI agents said, ‘Sure,’ and took it up,” Lemon said. “And that’s how my husband found out. Otherwise, no one would have known where I was.”
