We’ve seen plenty of old tweets come back to haunt people recently, from athletes like Josh Hader through directors like James Gunn. The latest example comes from the sports media world and involves Lindsey Ok, whose personal website (where the above photo comes from) includes plenty of NFL posts (such as “Le’Veon Bell Is An Idiot“) and a note that all her Baltimore Ravens posts can be found on USA Today’s Ravens Wire team blog. Her archive there only has one post (which came last week) since April’s draft, while several others have posted multiple times since then, but she did write a lot of pieces for that site around the draft and during the 2017 NFL season. And she wound up in the center of a controversy this week thanks to some old tweets, which contained the N-word, mockery of Asian people and more.
Robert Littal of Black Sports Online posted Ok’s tweets Monday and kept them there after Ok deleted them. Raw Story’s Martin Cizmar then wrote about the tweets. Ok then posted an apology to Twitter Tuesday afternoon, but it was more of an apology “to anyone that may have been offended” and a statement that “I don’t have a single racist, homophobic or bad bone in my body.”
— lindsey ok (@lindseyyok) July 24, 2018
Here are some of the tweets in question, collected from Cizmar’s piece:
Update: Here are some more (the two at right):
— BostonPJ (@BostonPJ1145) July 24, 2018
That’s not a great look for anyone, especially with the NFL n-word tweet, and that one in particular is a bad look for someone covering the NFL. And while Ok’s tweeted apology to those who were offended is a start (albeit a pretty late one, coming almost 24 hours after the first stories about her tweets), just declaring “I am not a racist” isn’t necessarily going to appease everyone here. It should be noted that when Charlotte Observer reporter Jourdan Rodrigue attracted controversy last fall for a pair of old tweets appearing to condone racism and one which used the n-word in a joke, she offered a much less limited “there is no excuse” apology and still wound up suspended. We’ll see if anything further comes of Ok’s tweets here.
About Andrew Bucholtz
Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.