This is an apology from Rocky Mountain News columnist Bill Johnson. It was published back on September 2, 2005. A reader recently sent it in to us.
She existed. It appears I just never wrote about her earlier. A reader pointed this out recently and challenged me to acknowledge it.
Here it is.
The woman appeared in a column here in July. A woman I encountered holding a large picture of a dead fetus during an abortion protest in Denver that week closely resembled a woman I had encountered some 13 years ago in California.
Every day for nearly two years a woman would stand outside an abortion clinic in Fullerton, holding the same type of photographs. One day, I pulled over on my way to work to ask the simple question: Why?
She screamed at me then, threatened to kill me if I didn't get away, and later called and e-mailed me at the paper multiple times to call me evil.
I mistakenly wrote six weeks ago that I had written of that long ago episode in another newspaper. If that column does exist, I cannot find it.
My July column was not an attempt to mislead or, as the astute reader contended, to lie. It was a remembrance of a terrible past episode that quite closely mirrored a more recent one.
Knucklehead.