GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson revealed Thursday that the "friend" he tried to stab when he was 14 was actually a close relative, and he said that person does not want to reveal himself.
CNN spent most of Thursday playing segments of a report that found eight of Carson's childhood friends who said they never knew him to have bouts of anger as he has described. Only one said he had a vague memory of the story of the attempted stabbing, but thought it was just a story.
"Those claims are absolutely true," Carson said Thursday night of Fox News Channel's
"The Kelly File." "This is simply an attempt to smear and to deflect the argument to something else."
Carson said he won't reveal the identities of any of the people he said he attacked before praying about his anger issues and leaving them behind.
"The person that I tried to stab, you know, I talked to today said would they want to be revealed? They were not anxious to be revealed," he said. "None of those people decided that they wanted to do this. And the media is ruthless. So I would say to the people of America, do you think I'm a pathological liar like CNN does, or do you think I'm an honest person?
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