MSNBC host Joy Reid says she’s ‘truly, truly sorry’ for hateful posts
(MSNBC)
MSNBC host Joy Reid has said she is “truly, truly sorry” after homophobic posts were uncovered on her blog.
The political TV host already issued an apology last year accepting responsibility for casual homophobia in posts to her Reid Report blog that she penned between 2007 and 2009.
However, the story took a strange twist this week when further allegations of homophobic posts to the blog surfaced on social media.
(Spike TV)
As the row rumbled on, LGBT group PFLAG cancelled plans to give Reid a Straight for Equality in Media award at a ceremony next month.
Reid has denied writing the newly surfaced entries to her now-defunct blog, dated over a decade ago, claiming instead that an “external party accessed and manipulated material from [my] now-defunct blog to include offensive and hateful references.”
In her apology on April 28, she once again said she had not penned the posts, but admitted that experts had not been able to prove that anyone had hacked her blog.
(MSNBC)
Speaking at the start of her show, AM Joy, Reid said: “Here’s what I know: I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me, but I can definitely understand based on things I have tweeted and I have written in the past why some people don’t believe me.
“I have not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for. I own that. I get it. And for that I am truly, truly sorry.”
The 49-year-old did not accept responsibility for her old posts, but did apologise for historical tweets in which she had attacked far-right commentator Ann Coulter – who said in January that people with AIDS shouldn’t be allowed into the US – with “transgender stereotypes.”
(William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty)
Reid called Coulter a “dude” and said that she “liked my drag queens fierce” in the tweets.
The host said: “I apologise to my friends and I want to apologise to the trans community and to Anne. Those tweets were wrong and horrible.
“I look back at the ways I talked about people and gender identity and sexual orientation and I wonder who that even was, but the reality is like a lot of people in this country that person was me.”
Reid said she had previously had “conservative views on LGBT issues,” citing one case in which a friend from college had told her he was gay.
(MSNBC)
She recalled having a “knee-jerk reaction” in which she told him that it was “so disappointing to the women he could have married.”
The friend did not speak to her for months, she said.
Reid explained that she was still learning, that she “likes to think I’ve gotten better over time,” and that back then she didn’t know about the “great people” in the LGBT community.
(Gabriella Demczuk/Getty)
“Even a decade ago when the country was in a very different place but I cannot take any of that back,” the presenter said.
“I can only say that the person I am now is not the person I was then.”
