On Saturday, MSNBC’s Joy Reid appeared to abandon her conspiracy theory that hackers had fabricated articles written on her now defunct website over a decade ago. Reid also gave an apology that was nothing more than a carefully-crafted PR statement.
“A community I support and deeply care about is hurting because of despicable and truly offensive posts being attributed to me,” Reid said at the start of her show. “Many of you have seen the blog posts circulating online and social media. Many of them are homophobic, discriminatory, and outright weird and hateful.”
Reid previously admitted to writing homophobic blog posts when some of them were first discovered in December, justifying her writings by saying “South Park” did it as well. When more offensive posts were found this week, which were homophobic and Islamophobic in nature, Reid denied writing them and instead claimed that she was hacked.
“When a friend found them and sent them to me I was stunned. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine where they came from and whose voice that was,” Reid said. “I hired cybersecurity experts to see if somebody manipulated my words or former blog and the reality is they have not been able to prove it.”
“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,” Reid continued. “I can only say that the person I am now is not the person I was then.”
WATCH:
On social media, Reid was overwhelmingly mocked and ridiculed over the entire situation, and for the things that she wrote on Twitter and her old blog: