Ex-vegan target of 'pie assault'

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SAN FRANCISCO, March 17 (UPI) -- An ex-vegan, hit with a pepper-laced pie while promoting her anti-vegetarian work at an anarchist book fair in San Francisco, says her assailants were cowards.

Lierre Keith, 45, stood at a lectern at Golden Gate Park's Hall of Flowers Saturday at the 15th annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair discussing her book, "The Vegetarian Myth," when three people in black hooded sweatshirts and masks ran from backstage, shouted, "Go vegan," and threw chili pepper-laced pies in her face, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Tuesday.

Keith, a 20-year vegan, was midway through her 30-minute talk railing, she said, against factory farming and factory-farmed meat when the attack was caught on video and later posted to Web sites.

"The whole thing was designed for social humiliation," said Keith, speaking from her sister's home in Kansas. "We're supposed to be against sadism and cruelty and domination, and these people were willing to do this to me."

The North American Animal Liberation Press Office allegedly supported the attack, the Chronicle said.

Keith's assailants were "masked marvels" who "made their statement very eloquently and succinctly on behalf of the billions of animals she advocates killing," the newspaper reported the Press Office as saying.