Joy Reid, host of the weekend MSNBC show “AM Joy,” claims her old blog was hacked after a Twitter.com user uncovered new anti-gay comments on Reid’s blog.
Reid, 49, apologized last year and admitted to writing anti-gay slurs on her old blog. But she claims the new anti-gay comments recently uncovered in a search an the Wayback Machine Internet archive of her blog were “fabricated”.
Gay rights group PFLAG National reacted swiftly to the new homophobic allegations by withdrawing Reid’s invitation to its 45th anniversary celebration and rescinding a “heterosexual ally” award she was set to receive.
The group, which had expressed support for Reid in the past, is now distancing itself from her.
“When we extended our invitation to Ms. Reid to honor her at our 45th anniversary celebration, we did so knowing about the blog posts from the late 2000s regarding Charlie Crist,” PFLAG National President Jean Hodges said in a statement on Tuesday. “We appreciated how she stepped up, took ownership, apologized for them, and did better — this is the behavior and approach we ask of any ally. However, in light of new information, and the ongoing investigation of that information, we must at this time rescind our award to Ms. Reid.”
It all began in December 2017 when a Twitter.com user, @Jamie_Maz, found old anti-gay comments written by Reid on her blog, the Reid Report, written in the early 2000s.
In the blog posts Reid speculated that former Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Christ, was gay. She referred to him as “miss” and she suggested that he married his wife to conceal his homosexuality.
Reid also mocked women in her blog posts, accusing total strangers of being lesbians, and she said it made her “cringe” to watch 2 gay men kissing.
Reid apologized for her old comments, and because she is a darling of the left, the matter was quickly put to rest.
But on Monday, @Jamie_Maz published screenshots of new anti-gay slurs allegedly written by Reid on her old blog.
Reid immediately denied writing the homophobic slurs. She claimed the screengrabs were fabricated and that her blog was hacked by unknown actors on the Dark Web.
Liberal media outlets, such as CNN and MSNBC, have totally ignored the new controversy.
Reid’s attorney fired off a letter to Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., which owns the Wayback Machine Internet archive, but Google refused to remove the old archived pages of her blog.
In the letters to Google, Reid’s attorney John H. Reichman insisted that Reid’s blog contained both “fabricated posts” and “fraudulent additions” in legitimate posts.
Reichman claimed the writing style and viewpoint did not match a “well-known liberal journalist,” – despite the fact that Reid admitted writing anti-gay slurs on her blog in the past.
Reid managed to have the pages deleted from the Internet archive after someone uploaded a Robots.txt file to her server which blocked the Wayback Machine’s web crawler bots.
Reid continues to insist that her blog was “hacked”, despite her refusal to provide forensic evidence to verify her claims.
The Wayback Machine disputed Reichman’s theory that Reid’s blog was hacked by unknown operatives on the Dark Web.
Addressing Recent Claims of “Manipulated” Blog Posts in the Wayback Machine
“When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions,” Wayback Machine’s Chris Butler wrote in a statement. “At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and different entities.”
Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images
