Candidate for Governor of Massachusetts Scott Lively was put under the microscope in a public radio interview – when a reporter brought up an assault case against him.

Pink Swastika author Scott Lively last week made it into the GOP primary against incumbent Governor of Massachusetts Charlie Baker, after more than a quarter of delegates gave him their backing.

Lively has links to anti-LGBT movements across the world, particularly in deprived countries. Human rights watchdogs allege his work is key to a wave of campaigns for anti-gay laws around the world.

But in an interview with public radio station WBUR, Lively came under the microscope over a 1991 assault on a woman.

A jury found Lively liable for damages in excess of $31,000 over the incident at an Oregon Citizens Alliance event, where he had assaulted photographer Catherine Stauffer – throwing her against a wall and dragging her across the floor of the church.

When WBUR interviewer Meghna Chakrabarti brought up the incident, Lively derided the “predatory” journalism and hit out at the “gotcha interview.”

Lively claimed: “I became an attorney because of what I experienced during that outrageous abuse of the judicial system in Multnomah County, Oregon.

“The case at issue was an extraordinarily political case in which the judge actually happened to be a corporate attorney for an organization that was funding the opposition in a ballot measure campaign in which I was the spokesman.”

Of the assault claims, he added: “That was all made up. She was a journalist for Just Out magazine. And a member of the political opposition during a ballot measure campaign on LGBT issues in Oregon.”

But Lively admitted paying more than $16,000 in damages after the incident “because [otherwise] I wasn’t going to be able to get a law license after going to law school.”

Lively added that being compared to a Nazi after the incident inspired him to write The Pink Swastika, a book which blames gay people for the Holocaust.

He told the station: “One of the reasons why I wrote ‘The Pink Swastika‘ [is] because the accusations that were being leveled against people just simply because we said that no, we don’t agree with special rights for people based on sexual orientation.

“So they started saying because of that anyone who opposes special rights for homosexuals is like the Nazis.

“Into my office comes a guy with a sheaf of documentation, and he said, you know they got it completely backwards. The Nazis… yeah, there were some anti-gay stuff, but the Nazis were filled with homosexuals. So he showed me the documentation, and I said this is outrageous.

“So later on I responded to it by showing that the argument that they were making, the attacks they were making against me were just simply not true. And the documentation proved my position and disproved there.”

Lively proceeded to defend the book, including the claim that “In their quest for power Nazi homosexuals were no different from today’s ‘gays'”.

He added: “My personality, my profile, the things I’m interested in, the skills that I have, are so much broader than this tiny little narrow issue about LGBT. I mean there’s … how much of what we deal with in Massachusetts really revolves around the LGBT agenda? It’s a tiny fraction of a fraction of 1 percent. But we’re dealing with the rest.

“The other 99.999 [percent] is stuff that we should we could probably agree on most of it. And I think if you have a list, if you listen to the, to the way that I would approach those issues that you would actually agree with me on most of the things that I say even though you’re, you’re a progressive on the other side.”