Just wanted to put up a quick diary for people to live blog/discuss this.
She is still denying writing the hateful posts.
She apologized again for the trans-antagonistic post about Ann Coulter and the use of anti-trans slurs in general.
Her apology seemed very sincere to me. When she says she honestly does not believe she wrote them, she is very believable. If she is being tried in the court of public opinion, her testimony would probably sway the jury.
For me personally the jury is still out (about whether she wrote the posts or not), even though I admire Joy’s work as a reporter and broadcaster.
Jonathan Capehart is getting very emotional right now and speaking a lot of truth I personally agree with: that the larger issue is not Joy herself but the lives of the people who are being hurt by the words attributed to her.
Discussion is open.
When unrestricted video is available I will add it to the diary.
Click here for a link to see her statement on the MSNBC website (you may need to enter your cable provider to see it).
UPDATE #1: The opening segment lasted 36 minutes with no commercial break. Now the show is moving on to discuss the delay of the Michael Cohen lawsuit.
UPDATE #2: I have done a quick transcript.
Good morning, and welcome to AMJoy.
A community that I support and that I deeply care about, is hurting, because of some despicable and truly offensive posts being attributed to me.
So many of you have seen these blog posts circulating on line and in social media.
Many of them are homophobic, discriminatory and outright weird and hateful.
When a friend found them in December, and sent them to me, I was stunned. Frankly, I couldn't imagine where they'd come from or whose voice that was. In the months since, I've spent a lot of time trying to make sense of these posts.
I hired cybersecurity experts to see if somebody had manipulated my words, or my former blog. And the reality is, they have not been able to prove it.
But here's what I know: 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 *have* written in the past why some people don't believe me.
I've not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for. I own that. I get it. And for that I am truly, truly sorry.
I had a conversation the other day with a friend who is also an advocate in the LGBT community in Florida, who rightly took me to task for my tweets mocking Ann Coulter using transgender stereotypes. I apologized to my friend, and I want to apologize to the trans community, and to Ann. Those tweets were wrong and horrible.
I look back today at some of the ways I have talked casually about people and gender identity and sexual orientation and I wonder who that even was. But the reality is that like a lot of people in this country, that person was me.
I grew up in a household that like many in America had conservative views on LGBTQ issues. I had friends, some of my closest friends in fact growing up, who I later learned were gay, and who had kept it secret from me and from everyone else we were close to, because they didn’t know what we would say, or if we would still be friends, or whether we would look at them differently. I remember a friend of mine my freshman year in college telling me he was gay and my knee-jerk reaction being that it was so disappointing to the women he could have married.
He was so hurt he didn't speak to me for months.
I am heartbroken that I didn't do better back then, knowing so many great people in the LGBT community including amazing friends, and journalists, and producers, and political operatives, and great dads and moms, and advocates and just regular people, and knowing how hard it must have been for so many of them to come out to their families to their friends, to just walk around in the world, especially for trans people.
And I feel like I should have known better than to ever write or tweet in a way that could make fun of, or make light of, or make light of that pain and that experience, even a decade ago when the country was in a very different place.
But I cannot take any of that back.
I can only say that the person I am now is not the person I was then.
I like to think I've gotten better as a person over time. That I am still growing, that I am not the same person I was ten or five or even one year ago. And I know that my goal is to try to be a better person and a better ally.
Now the reality is I have to own the things that I have written and tweeted and said.
And I'm hoping out of all of this there is an opportunity to talk about the ways in which hurtful speech really does imperil marginalized communities.
These issues matter, not just theoretically, but because we are talking about our friends, our kids, our coworkers.
People who deserve better than what I have sometimes given them.
And with that I want to introduce our panel...
YouTube video is up: