joining me now is joe ellis. nice to see you, joe. how did this all happen? from your perspective, where were you? what were you doing when you found that you were being blamed for the washington catastrophe? >> thank you for having me, michael. i want. >> to reiterate. >> that. >> i'm speaking. >> in a personal status. >> not representing the national. >> guard. >> u.s. army. or department of defense. >> my heart goes. >> out to the families of the victims, and they don't deserve these rumors. i learned of this at 4:30 a.m. friday morning from a text message of a close friend that a bot account was commenting on his facebook post asking if he knew joe ellis, who killed those people in the d.c. crash. then someone sent me a link to a pakistani newspaper article naming me in the crash, and then i received a daily mail phone call asking if i was alive and if i knew what was happening to me. >> what sort of threats, what sort of ridicule, what sort of pain have you been put through as a result of this process? >> well, michael, i was not surprised by the hate. t

joe ellis, a blackhawk pilot, became the target of attacks and false claims that she was flying the helicopter that collided with the commercial jet. she was forced to post a proof of life video to facebook in which she said, quote, it is insulting to the families to try to tie this to some sort of political agenda. they don't deserve that. i don't deserve this. we all know that trump has beef with die and you can agree with him or you can disagree with him, but he cannot blame die for everything. everything. plenty of things went wrong in the united states before there was diversity, equity and inclusion before companies and government agencies started prioritizing hiring more diverse and highly qualified employees. planes crashed when only straight white men flew them and directed them in the skies. and we didn't blame them for the failures or inadequacies or tragedies. we didn't blame them for their gender or race. we look for why the crashes happened and we solved for them. that's our work. when things go south, we leave it to the experts to get the evidence, to find out what went wrong an