Sean Spicer got an earful from a former schoolmate who confronted him at a book signing and claimed that the one-time White House press secretary called him ‘n****r’ while they were day students at a tony Catholic boarding school.
Spicer was at a Barnes & Noble in Middletown, Rhode Island, in the midst of a signing for his book, The Briefing: Politics, the Press, and the President, when the incident occurred Friday.
The confrontation was captured in a video by Newport Daily News.
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s book signing stop in Rhode Island Friday (pictured) was interrupted by a former schoolmate who claimed that Spicer had wanted to fight with him and hurled a racial slur at him when they were still teenagers
About 16 seconds into the video, a black man can be seen and heard calling out to Spicer from several feet away.
‘Sean, I was a day student at [Portsmouth] Abbey, too, with you,’ the man says enthusiastically, referring to the Rhode Island boarding school Spicer attended in the 1980s.
Spicer is on the road promoting his newly released book, The Briefing
Off screen, Spicer, who hails from Rhode Island, responds, ‘Yes! How are you?’
‘Remember? Remember me, you tried to fight me?” the man says, a wide smile across his face as the predominantly white crowd waiting to get their books signed laugh.
The crowd’s chortles cut off abruptly as the man then says, ‘Yeah, but you called me a n****r first, Sean.’
As people in the crowd murmur ‘get out of here,’ a man in a green shirt and khakis and a store security guard crowd the black man, forcing him to back up and away from the area where the book signing is taking place.
‘I was 14 then. I was a scared kid then, Sean. I’m not scared to fight you now,’ the black man says as a parting shot.
It’s unclear from the video what Spicer’s reaction was to the man’s accusations that he had used a racial slur against him in their youth.
The Providence Journal identified the black man as Alex Lombard of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Lombard told the newspaper that he is a member of Portsmouth Abbey’s Class of 1990, making him a year below Spicer, who graduated from the school in 1989.
Hours after the signing, Spicer posted this tweet thanking people for attending the signing
Spicer’s book signing tour has had other hiccups over the past week.
In a Barnes & Noble in New York City on Wednesday, a heckler was captured on video calling Spicer a ‘real piece of garbage’ and shouting out that The Briefing is ‘a garbage book,’ before noting that Sean is a ‘garbage person.’
Meanwhile, a BJ’s Wholesale Club in Seekonk, Massachusetts, which was supposed to play host to a Spicer signing on Saturday, was dropped from the schedule, the Boston Herald reported.
Spicer said that he was told by BJ’s the event was cancelled ‘due to the political climate.’