According to MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, homophobic posts she appeared to have made on The Reid Report, a site that pre-dated Reid’s former MSNBC show with the same name, were created by an “external party” that “manipulated material from my now-defunct blog.”
Last December, Reid apologized when she admitted she had written homophobic material between 2007-2009, including attacking former Florida governor Charlie Crist by calling him “Miss Charlie” and trumpeting that Crist was actually a closeted gay man who stayed closeted for fear of the effect such a revelation would have on his political career. As Mediate pointed out at the time, “As bad as the conspiracy theory is in itself, Reid doesn’t just suggest Cris is gay — she assumes he is gay and proceeds to attack him for it. ‘Miss Charlie, Miss Charlie. Stop pretending, brother. It’s okay that you don’t go for the ladies,’ wrote Reid in a 2007 post.”
But now Mediaite reports that new posts have been discovered from her blog that decried gay marriage and defended former NBA star Tim Hardaway’s anti-gay comments, commenting that “most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing,” were part of a “fabricated” effort limning her as “offensive and hateful.” One passage stated, “Most straight people had a hard time being convinced to watch ‘Broke Back Mountain.’ (I admit that I couldn’t go see the movie either, despite my sister’s ringing endorsement, because I didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex.) Does that make me homophobic? Probably.”
Mediate adds:
These anti-gay articles from The Reid Report, a site that pre-dated Reid’s former MSNBC show of the same name, were originally shared on Twitter by user Jamie_Maz who found them using the Wayback Machine — an Internet archiving service that takes periodic screenshots of popular web pages to preserve them. While the amateur sleuth provided Mediaite with legitimate links to all of the posts they tweeted screenshots of, neither the actual defunct site nor its archived pages are currently accessible, as their Wayback Machine links mysteriously disappeared in December after Mediaite‘s initial story on Reid’s homophobic comments about Florida Congressman Charlie Crist was published.
Reid told Mediaite:
In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.
I began working with a cyber-security expert who first identified the unauthorized activity, and we notified federal law enforcement officials of the breach. The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.
Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries. I hope that whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.
Reid’s explanation didn’t quite convince Alex Griswold of The Washington Free Beacon: