The man who accosted Elie Wiesel in a San Francisco hotel apologized in court.
Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, was on the witness stand in San Francisco Superior Court recounting what he described as his most harrowing ordeal since World War II when Eric Hunt blurted out, “I’m terribly sorry about what happened.”
Wiesel said he wasn’t sure the apology by Hunt, 23, of New Jersey, was sincere.
“I expected it,” Wiesel said. “I’m a novelist. I imagine situations. This is something a character would do. It’s clever, very clever.”
Hunt admitted to police that he traveled 3,000 miles to California to get Wiesel to admit the Holocaust did not occur. He is charged with six felonies, including attempted kidnapping, battery and stalking, in connection with the Feb. 1 incident at the Argent Hotel, where he approached Wiesel, the author of 40 books, in an elevator at a conference.
Hunt was arrested three weeks later after someone identifying himself as Hunt posted an account of the incident on an anti-Semitic Web site.
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