Joy Reid addresses homophobic blog posts: ‘I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things’
Joy Reid, the MSNBC host who accused hackers of inserting homophobic posts into her now-defunct blog, said Saturday that while she continued to deny having written the offensive language, security experts could not conclusively say her blog was breached.
“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things, because they are completely alien to me,” she said on her morning show, “AM Joy.” “But I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past, why some people don’t believe me.”
.@MSNBC‘s Joy Reid addresses homophobic blog posts:
“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things … But I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past, why some people don’t believe me.” pic.twitter.com/PWjdPfs5KB
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) April 28, 2018
She hired a cybersecurity expert to see if her former blog had been manipulated, she said, but “the reality is, they have not been able to prove it.”
The posts containing the offensive language, which Mediaite wrote about Monday, said that “most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing” and that “a lot of heterosexuals, especially men, find the idea of homosexual sex to be … well … gross.”
They also allegedly showed Reid arguing against legalized gay marriage and criticizing commentators who supported it, including Rachel Maddow, who is now one of Reid’s colleagues at MSNBC.
On Saturday morning, Reid devoted about 30 minutes of her show to the controversy, speaking with a supportive panel of experts who fight for LGBT rights.
“I have not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for,” said Reid, 49. “I own that. I did it. And for that I am truly, truly sorry.”
Most of Reid’s guests commended her for recognizing that her words had been hurtful, and redirected the conversation to Washington and the Trump administration’s policies.
On Saturday Reid apologized for some of her past tweets, including ones in which she mocked conservative commentator Ann Coulter by “using transgender stereotypes.” Reid grew up in a household that had conservative values on LGBT issues, she said, but “those tweets were wrong and horrible.”
“I look back today at some of the ways I’ve talked casually about people and gender identity and sexual orientation and I wonder who that even was,” she added. “But the reality is that like a lot of people in this country, that person was me.”
