LAS VEGAS — A woman was taken into custody after throwing what she described as a shoe at Hillary Clinton during a Las Vegas speech.
The incident happened moments after Clinton took the stage Thursday at an Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries meeting at the Mandalay Bay hotel-casino.
Clinton ducked but did not appear to be hit by the object, and then joked about it.
“Is that somebody throwing something at me? Is that part of Cirque de Soleil?” Clinton quipped.
She added: “My goodness, I didn’t know that solid waste management was so controversial. Thank goodness she didn’t play softball like I did.”
Former President George W. Bush, on a trip to Iraq in 2008, got a size-10 reminder of his unpopularity when a man hurled two shoes at him during a news conference.
“This is the end!” shouted the protester, later identified as Muntadar al-Zeidi, a correspondent for Al-Baghdadia television, an Iraqi-owned station based in Cairo, Egypt.
Bush ducked both shoes as they whizzed past his head and landed with a thud against the wall behind him.
“All I can report,” Bush joked later, “is a size 10.”
Clinton can now relate.
Ilene Rosen, a witness and the wife of a conventioneer, was seated in the second row when she saw “something orange thrown from the side aisle with papers that fluttered in the air.”
Rosen said the woman walked down the aisle and got about six rows from the front of the seating area when she threw the object. The woman then turned around, put her hands in the air and walked toward the back of the room before ushers caught up with her, Rosen said.
Security officers ushered out the woman, who said she threw a shoe but didn’t identify herself to reporters or explain the action. Mark Carpenter, spokesman for the recycling institute, said she wasn’t part of the convention.
Authorities said she would be arrested.
Rosen said the object that went past Clinton lodged in a decoration at the back of the stage for a moment, but a security officer quickly grabbed it and took it off stage.
After her speech, Clinton answered questions posed by Jerry Simms, the outgoing chairman of the organization. Simms first offered what he called a “deepest apology for that crude interruption.”
Clinton answered questions broadly, saying she felt politics today leads people to “do what they think will be rewarded.”
An attendee later handed a reporter a piece of paper that was apparently thrown by the woman. It appeared to be a copy of a Department of Defense document labeled confidential and dated August 1967; it referred to an operation “Cynthia” in Bolivia.
The former U.S. secretary of state and Democratic senator from New York has been traveling the country giving paid speeches to industry organizations and appearing before key Democratic Party constituents.
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