Police in Laconia arrested Stephen Redic around 8 a.m. Wednesday after a video showed him allegedly slapping a Turning Point volunteer outside a polling place. The 70-year-old now faces simple assault and disorderly conduct charges over an encounter that played out as voters were casting ballots at a Laconia elementary school.
The arrest gives the viral clip the one thing it did not have on its own: a police case. In the video, Redic appears to shout, give the victim the middle finger, slap him across the face and walk away. Turning Point described the other man as an 18-year-old, and police said they had no prior contacts with Redic before this incident.
What made the confrontation spread so quickly is the gap between what Redic said he wanted to do and what the video appears to show. Police said he approached the Turning Point tent as he was leaving and wanted to read a poem about rich people, but the footage that followed is a burst of anger, not a reading. Redic has a public record as a poet too: he published Tying My Shoes in 2023, and in that book he boasted of meeting every U.S. president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.
That matters because the episode happened at a polling location, where the line between speech and interference is already thin. It also leaves one practical question hanging over the arrest: what happened in the moments before the camera started rolling, and whether Redic ever read a poem at all. Police have charged him, but the wider story is now in the next stage, where the video, the witness accounts and the court process will have to match up.
