Reporter handcuffed at Romney victory speech

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A national correspondent was briefly handcuffed and detained on Tuesday as she was trying to watch Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s victory speech at the Diamond Center in Novi, Michigan.

The Economist‘s Natasha Loder told The New York Observer that she left the press filing room when she realized that the televisions in the room were showing the candidate’s speech on a tape delay.

Although the doors to the room where Romney was giving the speech had been opened all night, a security guard threatened to close them when reporters began gathering to listen to the speech in real time. A police officer approached the guard and offered to arrest Loder and other journalists for trespassing.

The officer handcuffed Loder after she refused to leave. Chad Livengood, a reporter for The Detroit News, tweeted photos of Loder as she “sat down in the door way in protest of the closing.”

A nearby Romney campaign staffer reportedly declined to intervene in the matter.

“I just said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I just wanted to do my job,” Loder told the Observer after speaking with the policeman and being released. “They gave me a ticking off and that was it.”

“There was somebody there [from the Romney campaign], he didn’t offer to help or smooth things over, not in front of me anyway,” she added.

There have been tensions between the campaign and members of the press after the candidate’s wife, Ann Romney, accused some reporters of wanting to see President Barack Obama re-elected.

“I am so mad at the press [that] I could just strangle them!” she recently told The National Review.

“And, you know, I think I’ve decided there are going to be some people invited on the bus and some people just aren’t going to be invited on the bus.”

Photo: Yfrog/Chad Livengood