It was bad enough that Sarah Sanders got booted from a hipster restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, in June 2018 for being President Trump’s spokeswoman. But the incident was even worse than first described.
In the press accounts, Red Hen co-owner Stephanie Wilkinson was polite in asking Sanders, part of a bigger family group, to leave because she didn’t like Trump’s policies. “I explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty and compassion and cooperation,” she said.
Sanders, in her new book, Speaking for Myself, already Amazon’s No. 13 bestseller, tells a very different story. She said Wilkinson told her: “You’re a terrible person. You are not welcome here, and I would like you to leave.”
A stunned Sanders and her husband Bryan decided to go home, but the others went across the street to a restaurant called the Southern Inn. There, she wrote, Wilkinson and others followed to “protest and harass” her group, who were, ironically, mostly liberal Democrats.
That prompted her brother-in-law to walk outside, where he told the Red Hen owner, “Sarah and her husband aren’t here. Nearly everyone you’re harassing right now voted for Hillary Clinton. What you’re doing is uncalled-for.”
