Daily Beast Suspends Joy Reid Column Over ‘Serious’ Accusations About Past Homophobic Blog Posts

“We’re going to hit pause on Reid’s columns,” says Daily Beast’s Noah Shachtman in a company-wide email

Joy Reid
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The Daily Beast will suspend future columns from Joy Reid due to the fallout over comments she made on an old blog a decade ago, the website’s executive editor Noah Shachtman told staff in an internal memo on Wednesday.

“We’re going to hit pause on Reid’s columns,” said Shachtman in an email reviewed by TheWrap. “As you’re well aware, support for LGBTQ rights and respect for human dignity are core to Daily Beast. So we’re taking seriously the new allegations that one of our columnists, Joy Reid, previously wrote homophobic blog posts during her stint as a radio host.”

“Obviously, this is a difficult situation,” Shachtman added. “We’ve all said and done things in our lives that we wish we hadn’t done. We deserve the room to grow beyond our past. But these allegations are serious enough that they deserve a full examination”

The email was first reported by Twitter by CNN’s Oliver Darcy.

Though she apologized for content on her old blog “The Reid Report” back in December, the MSNBC host has denied the latest revelations reported by Mediaite, saying that her the long defunct website was hacked. Shachtman told Beast employees that the company was investigating and would produce their own story on the issue.

Reid has been a longtime opinion columnist at the Daily Beast. Her last column for the website was published just days before her latest scandal.

Things continued to spiral for Reid — and MSNBC — over the story, which has now moved beyond the revelations reported by Mediaite to whether Reid was being honest about claims of hacking. On Wednesday evening, Reid’s lawyer John H. Reichman told TheWrap that the FBI has opened an investigation into the issue.

“We have received confirmation the FBI has opened an investigation into potential criminal activities surrounding several online accounts, including personal email and blog accounts, belonging to Joy-Ann Reid,” he said.  “Our own investigation and monitoring of the situation will continue in parallel, and we are cooperating with law enforcement as their investigation proceeds.”

Reid’s claims of hacking have been met with skepticism by reporters across the political spectrum and from the Internet Archive, whose Wayback Machine is the source of the incriminating material on Reid. In his own statement, Chris Butler, the director of open libraries at the Internet Archive, said they found no evidence to substantiate Reid’s claims.

“When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities,” said Chris Butler, the Director of Open Libraries at the Internet Archive.”

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