The actor Liam Neeson said in an interview with a British newspaper last month that he once spent a week walking the streets with a club looking for a black man to kill after a woman close to him was raped by someone she said was black.
“She handled the situation of the rape in the most extraordinary way,” Mr. Neeson said of the episode, which he said happened years ago. “But my immediate reaction was, did she know who it was? No. What color were they? She said it was a black person.”
“I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be approached by somebody,” the Northern Ireland-born Mr. Neeson said, using a British word that describes a clublike weapon. “I’m ashamed to say that, and I did it for maybe a week — hoping some black bastard would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him.”
Mr. Neeson made the comments, which were published in The Independent on Monday with an audio recording of the interview, during a press event to promote his new film, “Cold Pursuit.” The remarks were immediately met with public outrage.
Source: NY Times
