Mother Jones senior editor Mark Follman was more than happy to run wild with the claims of gun control supporter Jennifer Longdon last week, when she claimed that she was assaulted in an airport without anyone coming to her aid.

As Jennifer Longdon steered her wheelchair through the Indianapolis airport on April 25, she thought the roughest part of her trip was over. Earlier that day she’d participated in an emotional press conference with the new group Everytown for Gun Safety, against the backdrop of the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. A mom, gun owner, and Second Amendment supporter, Longdon was paralyzed in 2004 after being shot in her car by unknown assailants, and has since been a vocal advocate for comprehensive background checks and other gun reforms.

As Longdon sat waiting for her flight, a screen in the concourse showed footage of the press conference. A tall, thin man standing nearby stared at Longdon, then back at the screen. Then he walked up to Longdon and spat in her face. No one else blinked.

Longdon was shocked and embarrassed, she told me, but she didn’t falter. “Wow, aren’t you a big man,” she said as he turned and walked away. Instead of calling for security, she wheeled herself to a restroom to clean herself off. She was tired—she lives with constant physical pain—and didn’t want to miss her flight.

“Should I have done something more? Quite honestly, in the scheme of things it was a little man and a little moment,” she said. “He felt to me like a coward and a bully.”

Follman and Mother Jones ran the story without any corroboration or evidence supporting Longdon’s claim. We threw serious doubt on the spitting claims of Everytown for Gun Safety gun control speaker Jennifer Longdon last week by simply applying logic to her claim, noting:

She is asking us to believe that she watched an absolute stranger see her briefly in a news clip, and make the connection between the person on the screen for a few seconds and her. In other words, she claims that she watched him watch her, conveniently establishing the motive for his alleged attack.

She then asserts that he then decided that whatever she said in the few seconds of the news clip was so offensive that he was going to assault her in front of dozens of witnesses.

Longdon claims that this absolute stranger then walked up to her without saying a word and spat in her face. He allegedly did so in front of dozens of other people, and “no one else blinked.”

He then simply walk away from his flight.

Does this sound like a credible claim to you?

Progressives Today went one step further, noting that there was no footage of the Moms Demand protest shown at the airport.

Hmm. So this incident reportedly occurred on April 25 at the Indianapolis airport after the concourse television aired a report on the Every Town for Gun Safety protest outside the NRA convention?

That’s odd – the TV report never made it on the Everytown for Gun Safety website.
And, since the Indianapolis airport airs CNN on their TV screens you’d think you could find their report on the protest on their website, right?
Nope. It’s not there.
CNN has no record of the protest.

TV Eyes also has no record of Jennifer Longdon on cable news on April 25.

It looks like Mother Jones was just caught in a lie.
They really ought to do better research next time.

It remains to be seen if Follman and Mother Jones have the ethics to retract Longdon’s claim from the article, or retract the article in its entirely.

It also remains to be seen if Longdon’s apparent deception will be enough for Moms Demand Action/Everytown to dissociate themselves from her. I’m guessing they’ll likely shrug their shoulders and continue promoting Longdon as a featured speaker. When it comes to citizen control groups, one more lie isn’t a firing offense.