Former Sen. Barbara Boxer was assaulted and robbed on Monday in Oakland by two assailants who stole her cell phone.
Representatives for the former California senator, now 80, shared an account of the assault on Twitter.
“Earlier today former Senator Barbara Boxer was assaulted in the Jack London Square neighborhood of Oakland. The assailant pushed her in the back, stole her cell phone and jumped in a waiting car. She is thankful that she was not seriously injured,” representatives posted on Monday.
KPIX reported that the attack happened Monday afternoon around 1:15 p.m. Boxer told the outlet that after the attack she walked a couple blocks to a Verizon store for help and waited for police. A store worker, Joseph Hauken, told the outlet that Boxer came into the store, where he had just sold her the new iPhone two days before it was stolen.
“I just knew that she was shaking, very scared, traumatized. Just in distress, emotional distress. So I just was here to help her, get her water, whatever she needed,” Hauken said.
Boxer told the outlet she wasn’t physically hurt in the attack.
“I’m really saddened by this experience because here is a grandma alone, on her phone, and two young people attacked,” she told KPIX. “I’m not hurt physically at all. I’m just shook up.”
Boxer added that her two assailants looked younger than 18 and that one was driving a car while the other assaulted her.
“Well, he pushed me very hard,” Boxer told the outlet. “It’s hard for me to describe what happened because it was so fast, but, when I started to move away from him, he came behind me, pushed me hard, and then before I could fall it was like he grabbed my phone in front, so it’s just hard to put all together.”
Boxer also said she told her attackers that she was a grandmother in the hopes that they would leave her alone, but that didn’t work.
“I said, ‘Why would you do this to a grandma?’ I was yelling at the kid as he was running with my phone,” she said. “I said ‘I want to call my grandkids, why are you doing this?’ He could care less. He got in the car. But I hope he has some guilt.”
She also told the outlet that even though she retired from the Senate in 2017, she is still trying to help young people.
“There’s not one silver bullet, okay? It’s a host of things we have to do, to give our kids hope in the future, to give them opportunity, the education, the jobs, all of those things, the after-school (programs). But also when they step out of line, go after them,” she said.
Even though Boxer is a Democrat, left-leaning media outlets ignored the story of her assault, Fox News reported. CNN and MSNBC’s primetime lineups on Monday didn’t mention Boxer at all, but CNN’s “New Day” covered the story Tuesday morning, the outlet reported.