Beloved Chicago Sun-Times film critic, Roger Ebert, was attacked earlier this month during a screening of the Danny Boyle film, Slumdog Millionaire, at the Toronto Film Festival.

The New York Daily News reported that shortly after the film began, “a man in the audience started yelling, ‘Don’t touch me!’ People looked around and shrugged. Ten minutes later, the voice yells again, ‘I said don’t touch me!’” Then a few minutes later “the guy stands up in the darkness and thwacks the guy behind him with a big festival binder. He hit him so hard everybody could hear it. Everyone freaked out and turned around.”

The perpetrator turned out to be New York Post film critic, Lou Lumenick.  Apparently Ebert was having trouble reading the subtitles on the screen and was tapping Lumenick’s shoulder in the hopes that he would scooch over a bit (he was tapping as opposed to whispering since his voice has been compromised due to salivary cancer).

Lumenick, unaware he was assaulting the most famous and beloved film journalist in the world was surprised when he recognized Ebert, but failed to offer an apology.

Ebert himself wrote about the incident on his website rogerebert.com saying, “If it were up to me, you would never have heard about the incident at the Toronto Film Festival on the morning of Sept. 6 when a fellow critic whacked me with a rolled-up program or a festival binder or something. It has been blown out of proportion. It is of little interest.”

Nice going Lumineck.  By assaulting a 66 year-old, Pulitzer Prize winning cancer survivor, you have succesfully become the most hated film critic in the world.  And that’s saying something.