Joy Reid claims that recently unearthed homophobic posts on her blog are fakes and that her account was hacked. She also says that a cybersecurity consultant has proof that her old blog has been hacked. However, the consultant, Jonathan Nichols, had trouble producing the promised evidence, and what he did produce does not hold up to an investigation, reports The Daily Beast. Blog posts that Nichols claimed do not appear on the Internet Archive are there.
Last year, Reid apologized for a 2007 blog post in which she called then-Republican Gov. Charlie Christ “Miss Charlie” and suggested that he wanted to sleep with men while on his honeymoon with his wife. Reid apologized on-air, calling the remarks “insensitive, tone-deaf and dumb.” But then on Monday, media-news site Mediate published more homophobic blog posts, including screenshots taken by The Wayback Machine’s cached version of Reid’s blog. In the posts, she appears to mock gay celebrities like Anderson Cooper and Clay Aiken, defend homophobia as “intrinsic” to straight people and say that gay advocacy groups prey upon “impressionable teens.”
Reid did not apologize this time, but instead said that her blog was hacked. The Daily Beast writes that it appears Nichols’ evidence is flawed. (Reid also is a columnist for The Daily Beast. On Thursday, the website “hit pause” on her columns as it investigates her hacking claims.)
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