Woman forced to throw MAGA hat in trash at Cardinals game gets team's apology for staff 'misunderstanding'
The Arizona Cardinals have apologized to a woman who was told she had to remove a "Make American Great Again" hat in order to enter State Farm Stadium for the team's game against the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday.
The team confirmed it has reached out to the woman in a statement to Fox News Digital on Wednesday.
"In an isolated incident at Sunday's game, a stadium security member misunderstood a policy on prohibited items. Like most venues, ‘signage, posters, flags, or displays that are….political in nature' are not permitted. However, that did not apply in this instance. Moving forward we will work to provide clarity to all stadium personnel in these situations. We have also reached out to the individual involved to communicate that their experience was not consistent with our policies and practices and to apologize for that," the statement read.
The woman, an Arizona native and Cardinals season ticket holder, was named Susan Rosener. She and her husband were on their way to their seats to see the Cardinals' surprising 41-10 win over the Rams, before a stadium staffer mistakenly told her to take off her hat baring the famous slogan of former President Trump's election campaign, according to multiple reports.
"You can't bring that in here," the staffer said, according to Rosener, via News 12 Phoenix.
"She's like, 'No political hats or shirts.' And I said, 'I haven't heard that at all.' And I said, 'That doesn't make sense to me.' And she goes, 'I said, Take your hat off,'" Rosener said. "In retrospect, I wish I would have stood my ground a little bit, but I wasn't sure what the repercussions would be, and my husband would kill me if I did something with the season tickets or that jeopardizes them somehow."
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The incident was initially publicized in a post on X by Turning Point Action Field Rep. VP Alyssa Goncales, who also posted alleged screenshots of text messages with other supposed attendees who were either also forced to remove MAGA hats or witnessed others being forced to.
"We have only heard from one individual. But if there were a couple others that had a similar interaction that should not have happened either. Again, it's not our practice and in the 18+ seasons we've been in this stadium, it apparently has never occurred previously. Moving forward, though, we will work with all of the third party groups that interact with our fans to make sure this abundantly clear," the team said in another statement to Fox News Digital in response to the other allegations.
While the Cardinals do have a list of banned items for entering State Farm Stadium on game days, "political hats or shirts" are not on that list.
Sunday's incident is not the first time that an American sporting event attendee carrying pro-Trump merchandise had to face orders from security.
In the spring and summer of 2021, a man was removed from MLB games at Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park and Citizens Bank Park for hanging banners from the stands that read "Trump Won! Save America!" The man, Dion Cini, now a conservative political influencer on X, posted bodycam footage of his police escorts out of the stadiums multiple times.
On June 27 of that year, Cini posted images on X (then known as Twitter) of an alleged letter from MLB informing him that he had been barred from MLB games until further notice.
Cini commented on the recent incident involving Rosener in an interview with Fox News Digital on Wednesday.
"That's just the country that we've become, and the fact that she did it and put it in a can is the reason why they asked her to do it, because they know that she would probably comply. And that basically sums up the whole state of America right now," Cini said. "You'd have to kill me for me to take off my MAGA hat without force! I've never taken off my MAGA hat for anybody."
Arizona is considered one of the "sunbelt" battleground states in the upcoming election, as Trump won the state in 2016 but lost it in 2020.
A Fox News election survey published on Aug. 28 shows that VP Harris currently leads the former president by less than 1 point.
In the Arizona Senate race, Democrat Ruben Gallego leads Republican Kari Lake by 56%-41%. Democrat Jacky Rosen bests Republican Sam Brown by 55%-41% in the Nevada Senate race. In the North Carolina gubernatorial race, Democrat Josh Stein tops Republican Mark Robinson by 54%-43%.
In the aftermath of Rosener's incident, Lake has called on every Cardinals fan to wear MAGA hats to the team's home games for the remainder of the season.
"Every [Cardinals] fan who loves America should wear their MAGA hat to EVERY AZ Cardinals game this season," Lake wrote in a post on X in response to a story on the incident.
Meanwhile, concerns in the state that illegal immigrants may be able to cast votes in the upcoming election have become rampant over the current cycle.
A "coding oversight" in state software is calling into question the citizenship status of 100,000 registered Arizona voters, prompting the state's Democratic secretary of state to insist he will send out ballots to those affected anyway.
"I am unwilling to disenfranchise this many voters by limiting them, suddenly, and with little notice, to a federal-only ballot when none of them had actual notice of or blame for this issue," Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said during a Tuesday news conference. "We inherited this problem. We're on it, and we're going to fix it. It's as simple as that."
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