Ben Carson Stabbing Story Questioned: Report Cites Changing Versions In Telling Of Violent Tale


Ben Carson, the surprise frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary campaign, made headlines this week when he told the NBC program Meet The Press about his “volatile” violent teenage years — repeating a story he’d told before, claiming that at age 14 he “tried to stab someone.”

See Carson discuss his violent past in the CNN video, above. He told the story in response to a claim by rival candidate Donald Trump that Carson is too “low energy” to serve as an effective president.

Ben Carson stabbing story Donald Trump
Presidential candidate Donald Trump (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)

It wasn’t the first time Carson told the stabbing story. Last year he gave the story to the conservative Daily Caller news site, and also related the same tale in an interview with Univision reporter Jorge Ramos. An account of the incident also appears in the latest Ben Carson book, One Nation: What We Can All Do To Save America’s Future.

“A classmate came along and began to ridicule me. I had a large camping knife in my hand and without thinking I lunged at him, plunging the knife into his abdomen.”

But according to a report appearing Tuesday on the Daily Beast news site and authored by Gideon Resnick, not only has Ben Carson told the stabbing story on numerous occasions, the tale appears in not just one but six of the nine books he has published — and every time Carson tells the tale, it changes.

In a 1996 book, Resnick reports, Carson wrote about attempting to stab a friend he calls “Bob” with “a camping knife,” only to have the blade strike his friend’s metal belt buckle and snap. In another book published that same year, Carson tells a more elaborate version of the “Bob” story, adding the detail that the argument came about when “Bob” complained about the music to which young Ben Carson — who today is 64 years old, placing this incident 50 years ago — was listening on a transistor radio.

Carson then fled the scene, the near-murder pushing him into a personal revelation that led to his deep belief in God, according to Carson’s account.

In a book published four years later, Carson again tells the same story, according to the Daily Beast report, but this time it is “Bob” who flees, not the teenage Carson.

Seven years later, Carson published yet another book, Take The Risk. In this version, Carson and “Bob” also argue over music on a radio, but the knife used is distinctly different.

“A wave of rage welled up, and almost without thinking, I pulled out the pocketknife I always carried. In what seemed like one continuous, involuntary motion, I flicked open the blade and lunged viciously, right at my friend’s stomach.”

Again, the blade breaks on the other boy’s belt buckle.

The fifth published version of the story appears in Carson’s 2011 book, America The Beautiful. In that telling, as Resnick recounts, Carson’s details are vague, stating only that as a teen he felt “anger and frustration” over “the racial and socioeconomic injustice I experienced.”

When one unnamed boy “pushed me too far,” Carson wrote, “I pulled out my knife and lunged at him, striking him in the abdomen.” The boy then falls to the ground before Carson notices that his knife has snapped in two on his intended victim’s belt buckle.

In the final published version of the stabbing story, in the Ben Carson book One Nation, the teen Carson is simply “minding my own business when a classmate came along and began to ridicule me.”

Carson just happens to be holding a “camping knife” in his hand, for some reason — not in his pocket — and Carson immediately “lunged at him, plunging the knife into his abdomen.”

This time, the unidentified boy simply “backed off” before Carson realized that — as always — the blade had struck the boy’s belt buckle.

In the course of six books, Carson went from stabbing a friend named “Bob” in an argument over music on a radio, to randomly stabbing an unidentified “classmate” for no reason other than that the classmate insulted him.

Ben Carson Donald Trump stabbing story
Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump (r) and Ben Carson (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The Daily Beast said that neither Ben Carson nor his campaign would clarify the story, identifying the accurate version — calling into question what really happened in the now-famous stabbing incident a half-century ago. Carson now leads polling in the state of Iowa by 14 percent.

[Featured Photo By Scott Olson / Getty Images]

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