FoxNews.com is dishonestly trying to discredit Joy Villa’s sexual assault accusation against Corey Lewandowski with an odious bit of whataboutism called, “Video shows Joy Villa smacking a man on the bottom after she called out Corey Lewandowski.”

Let me say for starters I am no fan of Villa, nor do I think it’s clear that her smacking a man on the bottom, as the video (embedded below) shows, was consensual or even appropriate. But it’s clear she was joking around with friends - which is a different situation than the one she faced with Lewandowski who, she says, she did not know when he smacked her.

The real point with regard to Lewandowski is that Villa asked him to stop smacking her and he didn’t. Lewandowski reportedly responded to her request to stop by saying, “Go ahead, I work in the private sector,” and then slapping her on the buttocks again. He didn’t even say something like, “Well, you do it so why can’t I?” which might have indicated a (mis)understanding that she was OK with that kind of behavior. He clearly knew she wasn’t.

But it wasn’t until the fifth paragraph that Fox got to that point:

“That was consensual, amongst friends and he didn’t object to it at all,” Villa told The Wrap. “There is a difference between what Corey did to me, in which he was a stranger, it was unwanted and I told him to stop multiple times, and he not only didn’t stop but proceeded to hit me again. This isn’t rocket science: No means no.”

What did not make it into the FoxNews.com story is that Lewandowski did not deny the accusation when he was asked to “respond” to it on Fox Business this week.

And if Fox thinks history is so important, why did it leave out the fact that this is (at least) the second assault charge filed against Lewandowski by a woman in two years?

What did make it into the FoxNews.com report was that the video “undercut” Villa’s claim. This is the lead paragraph (with my emphses added):

Joy Villa filed a police report against a former Trump campaign manager for smacking her on the bottom two times at a party when they first met. However, her point has been undercut slightly after a video surfaced of her doing the same thing to a man at a different party.

No, her point has not been undercut at all and Fox News, of all places, should know that.

Watch Lewandowski not deny the accusation below (and host Charles Payne avoid asking if it was true), during a December 27, 2017 interview on Fox Business Network’s Varney & Co.