On Saturday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” host Joy Reid addressed the controversy over past blog posts attributed to her by stating that she doesn’t believe she wrote the blog posts, but she has written things that are “cruel” or “hurtful” in the past and apologized for those writings.
Reid said, “A community that I support and that I deeply care about is hurting because of some despicable and truly offensive posts being attributed to me. Now, many of you have seen these blog posts circulating online and in social media. Many of them are homophobic, discriminatory, and outright weird and hateful. When a friend found them in December and sent them to me, I was stunned. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine where they’d come from or whose voice that was. In the months since, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sense of these posts. I hired cybersecurity experts to see if somebody had manipulated my words or my former blog. And the reality is, they have not been able to prove it.”
She continued, “But 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 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.”
Reid specifically addressed and apologized for “wrong and horrible” tweets making fun of Ann Coulter that used transgender stereotypes.
Reid added, “I feel like I should have known better than to ever write or tweet in a way that could make fun of or make light of and that experience, even a decade ago, when the country was in a very different place. But I cannot take any of that back. I can only say that the person I am now is not the person I was then. I like to think I have gotten better as a person over time, that I’m still growing, that I’m not the same person I was 10 or 5 or even one year ago. And I know that my goal is to try to be a better person and a better ally. Now the reality is, I have to own the things that I have written and tweeted and said, and I’m hoping, out of all of this, there’s an opportunity to talk about the ways in which hurtful speech really does imperil marginalized communities.”
Reid then had a lengthy panel discussion on how rhetoric like hers can harm people in the LGBT community.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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