Tucker Carlson,
the former CNN and Fox News political chat host, has said he was
“physically mauled” by a demon a year and a half ago, in an assault that
he says left him bleeding and with scars from “claw marks”.
Carlson made the claim while speaking in an upcoming documentary, Christianities? In a preview clip on YouTube,
Carlson is asked by John Heers of the non-profit First Things
Foundation if he believed that “the presence of evil is kickstarting
people to wonder about the good”.
“That’s what happened to me. I had a direct experience with it,” said Carlson.
Asked
if he was referring to journalism, Carlson responded: “No, in my bed at
night. I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and
mauled, physically mauled.”
Carlson, who said
he still bears the scars, said his assailant was a “demon”. He added:
“Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.”
He
said at the time of the attack, he was asleep in bed. I was “totally
confused, I woke up, and I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I was going
to suffocate”, he said.
“I walked around
outside and then I walked in and my wife and dogs had not woken up. And
they’re very light sleepers. And then I had these terrible pains on my
rib cage and on my shoulder, and I was just in my boxer shorts and I
went and flipped on the light in the bathroom, and I had four claw marks
on either side underneath my arms and on my left shoulder. And they’re
bleeding.”
He added that he explained the
encounter to an assistant, an evangelical Christian, who told him: “That
happens, people are attacked in their bed by demons.”
Carlson,
who lives in the woods of Maine, did not say where the attack occurred,
but called it a “transformative experience” that left him “seized with
this very intense desire to read the Bible”.