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Joy Reid Insists She Didn’t Write Homophobic Blog Posts During MSNBC Address

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On Saturday, April 28, Joy Reid publicly denied that she was the author of several recently resurfaced homophobic blog posts on her former website before apologizing for said blog posts and for other comments she admits to. Reid admits the whole situation sounds a bit far-fetched:
When a friend found [the posts] 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.
Reid does not “believe” she wrote the posts, which even her fans admit is a strange choice of words:
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’ve 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.
Twitter was skeptical to say the least. The blog posts in question were posted from 2007 to 2009 and featured startlingly homophobic analyses of Washington and Hollywood. Some of the most prominent examples were posted to Twitter by @Jaime_Maz: Some of these posts are absolutely shameful. Professionals are incredibly skeptical of Reid’s claim she was hacked. The blog posts in question were archived by Wayback Machine, which archives websites in real time. Hayler Miller explained how this makes Reid’s story doubtful on Huffpost:
Since Wayback Machine captures sites in real time, this means someone would have had to hack Reid’s blog numerous times between 2005 and 2009. If someone hacked her blog recently and attempted to change the timestamps to a previous year, Wayback Machine would still archive the posts according to the date they were actually hacked. … It’s unclear who would repeatedly target Reid in the mid-to-late-2000s, more than a decade before she rose to national fame with MSNBC. Reid’s Wikipedia page wasn’t even created until 2014.
While Reid sticks to her story surrounding the hacking, she’s owned up to authoring several tweets which mock Ann Coulter and the transsexual community, saying they were “wrong and horrible.” https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/19374227866 https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/12800640919 Reid concluded her apology/denial by acknowledging she is still trying to improve as a person:
The person I am now is not the person I was then. I like to think I’ve gotten better as a person over time — that I’m still growing, that I’m not the same person I was 10 or five or even one year ago. And I know that my goal is to try to be a better person and a better ally. H/T – MSNBC/Facebook, Vox