About a week ago, Variety argued that ESPN missed an opportunity with SportsCenter anchor Jemele Hill’s tweet-gate saga, in which she slammed President Trump, calling him a “bigot” and “white supremacist.”
Maybe they did, but she sure as heck didn’t. In a first-person essay written on The Undefeated, Hill reiterated her stance—which has mostly been analyzed via her and her employer’s “apology” tweets.
Hill says that she cried in ESPN’s president John Skipper’s office following the blowback from her anti-Trump tweets. “It was the first time I had ever cried in a meeting,” she writes. “I didn’t cry because Skipper was mean or rude to me. I cried because I felt I had let him and my colleagues down.”
That said, she explains that “I also can’t pretend as if the tone and behavior of this presidential administration is normal. And I certainly can’t pretend that racism and white supremacy aren’t real and that marginalized people don’t feel threatened and vulnerable, myself included, on a daily basis.”
She admits that “Twitter wasn’t the place” for her remarks, but that she’s not sorry for her comments about Trump. “Let me be clear … my criticisms of the president were never about politics. In my eyes, they were about right and wrong.”
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