Harry Reid Was Injured in a Fight With His Brother – Unproven!

Harry-Reid-Was-Injured-in-a-Fight-With-His-Brother.htmHarry Reid Was Injured in a Fight With His Brother – Unproven!

Summary of eRumor:

Senator Harry Reid said that he was injured in a freak New Year’s Eve workout accident but actually suffered those injuries in a fight with his brother, Larry Reid.
The Truth:
This is an unproven conspiracy theory about how Democratic Senator Harry Reid was injured on New Year’s Eve.
Harry Reid’s staff said that the senator broke bones in his face and his ribs when a piece of exercise equipment broke and sent him hurtling into some cabinets on New Year’s Eve. Reid later had surgery to remove a blood clot from his eye and to repair broken orbital bones, his staff said.
Conspiracy theories about Harry Reid’s injuries went into overdrive when he announced that he had decided not to seek re-election after the accident had given him down time to “ponder and think.”
The theory that Harry Reid suffered the injuries in a fight with his brother, Larry, went viral after the blog site Power Line made the case for it in a series of posts. The site reported that an Alcoholics Anonymous counselor named Easton Elliott said that Larry Reid showed up at a meeting in Henderson, Nevada, on New Year’s Eve drunk and covered in blood and told the group about a fight with a family member:

“Easton Elliott didn’t think much more about Larry until, several weeks later, he saw a newspaper story about Larry Reid, Harry Reid’s brother, being arrested for DUI and assaulting a highway patrolman. The story was accompanied by a photograph, and Elliott immediately recognized Larry Reid as the ‘Larry’ who had attended the AA meeting on New Year’s Eve. Putting that fact together with news stories about Harry Reid being admitted to a hospital on New Year’s Day, and with Larry’s references to the Secret Service, he concluded that the family member with whom Larry fought was Harry Reid. He also knew that Harry Reid’s home is within a short distance of the location of the AA meeting.”

It’s true that Larry Reid was arrested for drunken driving and assaulting a state patrol officer in February of 2015, the Las Vegas Journal Review reports. But, outside of Easton Elliott’s first-hand account, there’s no proof that Harry and Larry Reid got into a fistfight on New Years Eve.
And there’s no way to tell if Easton Elliott is a real person or not. The blog post said that the name “Easton Elliott” was made up by a Las Vegas businessman to use in his second career as an addiction recovery life coach. The only trace of Easton Elliott online is a Linkedin profile that has zero connections.
And although Power Line published Easton Elliott’s account, the website didn’t endorse it, or him:

“That is Easton Elliott’s account. I can’t vouch for it, of course, but if what he says about the AA meeting is accurate, the inferences he draws seem reasonable.”

Despite conspiracy theories like this one about how Harry Reid was injured, there’s no proof that it was from anything more than a freak workout accident at this time.