Brutal attack on Republican fundraiser & boyfriend in New Orleans may have been politically motivated

Last Friday night, Allee Bautsch, the chief fundraiser for Louisiana's Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, was violently assaulted, along with her boyfriend, outside of a famed New Orleans restaurant. Reports on the incident remain murky, but a source close to Bautsch tells Yahoo! News that Bautch believes they were politically motivated and has been hospitalized for days to treat her injuries.

The incident took place outside the high-end French Quarter eatery Brennan's, where the Louisiana Republican Party was holding a fundraiser to coincide with the Southern Republican Leadership Conference happening in New Orleans that weekend. According to a bulletin put out by the New Orleans Police Department, the fight began around 10:45 p.m., when a group of three to five men made "derogatory comments" of an undisclosed nature to Bautsch about her boyfriend, Joe Brown. When Brown "turned toward" the men making the remarks, he was hit by at least one of them. The report notes that Bautsch "fell to the ground and screamed" and suffered a broken leg when she "attempted to break up the altercation."

In issuing the bulletin, the NOPD sought the public's help in tracking down one of the assailants, whom they described as a "dirty" looking male with long auburn-colored hair styled in a ponytail. And Brown suffered "a mild concussion, broken jaw and broken nose," according to the New Orleans Times Picayune. A bystander's photo showing police officers attending to Bautsch and Brown after the attack was posted to Bobby Jindal's Facebook page yesterday.

Though the nature of the attack has remained a bit of a mystery, some conservative blogs alleged that Bautsch and Brown might have been targeted because they were wearing lapel pins expressing support for Sarah Palin. The former Alaska governor gave an address at the Leadership Conference that same day — but a Jindal spokesperson has since denied that either Bautsch or Brown was wearing a Palin pin.

Yahoo! News spoke to a friend of Allee Bautsch who's been in communication with her since the attack. The friend, who declined to be named because the attackers are still at large, described the group who descended on Bautsch and Brown as "some weird Bobby Jindal protesters" there in opposition to the state's governor. The friend confirmed the earlier reports that Bautsch "got caught in the middle" of the altercation as she tried to break it up. Bautsch's friend also reported that she's in "loads of pain" with "rods in her leg and ankle," but that she was also "released yesterday from the hospital and is resting at her home in Baton Rouge."

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