Ben Carson attacked CNN late Thursday for questioning his accounts of violence in his youth.
“Those claims are absolutely true,” he said of attempts he made as a teen to stab a relative and hit his mother with a hammer.
Carson, a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has told the stories to mark how his life changed.
But CNN reported Thursday that Carson’s past classmates, friends and neighbors did not recollect him as the violent youth he has often described.
{mosads}“You know, I’m a hundred percent sure that they’re true,” Carson told host Megyn Kelly on Fox News’s “The Kelly File.” “This is simply an attempt to smear and deflect the argument to something else.
“The media is ruthless,” the retired neurosurgeon added. “So, you know, 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? I’m going to leave that up to the American people to make that decision.”
Carson then argued that CNN is trying to discredit him, given his surging popularity with voters nationwide.
“It’s a smear campaign,” he insisted. “They’re going to go back and try to find anything that I’ve ever said and try to get me on the defensive about it in order to distract away from the things that are important.
“There’s so much going on that we need to be dealing with,” Carson added. “This is just garbage. They don’t want to talk about it because they don’t have good solutions for it.”
Carson is coming under increased scrutiny from the media and other candidates as he has risen in polls. Comments he made about Egypt’s Pyramids being used to hold grain have also come under attention in recent days.
On Friday, Trump tweeted:
Carson has repeatedly recounted his early years in poverty as a period of frequent aggression and rage.
He argued Friday that CNN is wrong in its reporting, given the severity of the situations he is describing.
“I want to point out how silly the CNN investigation is,” he said. “Because when I have flashes of temper, it would only be the people who were directly involved.
“They were not anxious to be involved,” Carson added of the other parties mentioned in his violent incidents. “I didn’t want to put their lives under the spotlight.”