Filmer Behind Romney’s ’47 Percent’ Video Goes Public
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JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — Mitt Romney may have lost the presidency because he offended a bartender.
In his public debut on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, bartender Scott Prouty revealed that he filmed the famous “47 percent” video of Romney at a closed-door fundraiser in May 2012 and leaked it to Mother Jones magazine’s David Corn, who posted it in September. It was a move, Prouty said, intended to capture the most attention possible.
Until now, Prouty’s identity has been hidden. It’s been known that president Jimmy Carter’s grandson, James, facilitated the story, putting the unidentified, surreptitious filmer in contact with Corn. It’s now known that Prouty contacted Carter after seeing Carter’s contributing byline on a Corn story about GlobalTech, the Chinese appliance manufacturer Romney mentioned at the fundraiser.
Prouty explained why he leaked the video.
“The people that were there [at the fundraiser], they paid $50,000 per person for dinner,” he told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz in an exclusive interview.
“You know, I grew up in a blue-collar area in Boston, and nobody I know can afford to pay $50,000 for dinner,” Prouty said. “I just don’t know anybody that can do that and, in a way, I just felt like, if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, there’s a lot of people that can’t afford to pay $50,000 for one night, one dinner, and I felt an obligation for all the people who can’t afford to be there.”
Prouty, who worked on the catering staff at the Romney fundraiser, said he didn’t originally intend to leak the video when he began recording it.
“I had brought the camera, and a lot of other people brought cameras thinking that people would take pictures, like he did in the past, coming back with the staff and taking pictures,” he said. “I was interested to hear what he had to say, but I didn’t go there with a grudge against Romney.”
But when Romney made his now-infamous “47 percent” remark, Prouty said, that’s when he made sure his camera was capturing it because he wanted everyone to hear Romney’s words, unvarnished.
Romney told donors that 47 percent of voters would chose Obama “no matter what” because they are people “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax.”
“My job is not to worry about those people,” Romney said. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Prouty, who described himself as a bartender who lives a comfortable life but struggles like everyone else, said the decision to leak the recording was daunting.
“Why am I gonna do this, why am I gonna risk everything? Should I risk everything, should I put myself in jeopardy, should I put myself in legal jeopardy?” Prouty said he asked himself before handing the video over to Corn.
But he wanted voters — particularly middle-class voters like himself — to hear Romney’s private words and judge for themselves, Prouty told Schultz.
“Everybody needed to hear that,” he said.
Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio