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Liberal Journalist Dresses In Costume To Make Up Story About DC National Guard

A tweet by HuffPost journalist Jennifer Bendery featuring a Handmaid's Tale protester outside Union Station is sparking fierce debate—did she stage the photo?
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[Kai Medina (Mk170101), CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons]
Walt RasingerBy
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A viral controversy has engulfed HuffPost journalist Jennifer Bendery after she posted an image to Twitter that critics say was staged. The September 3 post showed a woman dressed in a Handmaid’s Tale costume outside Union Station, framed as a symbol of “Trump’s militarization of DC.” Bendery captioned the shot with the hashtag #UnderHisEye, evoking the dystopian theme of Margaret Atwood’s novel.

Within hours, however, accusations began circulating that the woman in the photograph was Bendery herself. A side-by-side comparison included in replies highlighted her resemblance to the robed figure, prompting one user to post, “That’s literally you. You staged a stupid photo for your own shi**y article?”

A proposed community note attached to Bendery’s post deepened the skepticism. It asserted there was “no independent verification” that the photographed woman was a genuine protester or that the moment was spontaneous. It also noted the second photo in Bendery’s post appeared to be a stock image of the journalist herself. If approved, the note would cast doubt on the credibility of her claim—particularly since she linked the costume scene to a recent Guardian article describing Trump’s National Guard deployments in Washington, moves decried by critics as a “military takeover.”

The uproar has drawn sharp reactions across social media. Some users mocked Bendery with memes and ridicule, while others defended the symbolism of the Handmaid’s Tale costume, which has appeared in feminist demonstrations since at least 2017. Yet without metadata or eyewitness accounts verifying the authenticity of the Union Station image, critics argue the post risks becoming another example of partisan theater framed as journalism.

Bendery, a seasoned Capitol Hill reporter and participant in the Congressional Women’s Softball Game, has not responded publicly. Meanwhile, media ethics observers warn of broader consequences. Subbu Vincent, recently writing in Columbia Journalism Review, stressed the need for newsrooms to reassess standards of sourcing and bias at a time when accusations of “fake news” and AI manipulation erode public trust.

What he didn’t say, because it was obvious, was that journalists themselves should cause the fake news.

Whether Bendery’s post will withstand scrutiny or collapse under the weight of suspicion remains uncertain, but her post did see several funny responses on Twitter mocking her pathetic attempt to gin up controversy over Trump’s move to tackle crime in DC.

Some people in the nation’s capital are “loving it.”

Luckily, besides the National Guard, there are other crimestoppers in the neighborhood:

It’s getting wild out there:

 

 

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser recently shocked her fellow Democrats by praising Trump’s move in DC. On Tuesday, the mayor ordered Washington’s police and other authorities to supplement Trump’s action, “sickening” liberals. 

[Read More: The Most Inappropriate Protest In A Long Time]

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