‘Young Turks’ Founder Cenk Uygur Apologizes for ‘Ugly,’ ‘Insensitive’ Old Blog Posts (Exclusive)

Liberal host once wrote that women are genetically “flawed” because they don’t want to have sex often enough

“Young Turks” creator and host Cenk Uygur made multiple graphic and disparaging remarks about women in his early days as a blogger, including saying that women were genetically “flawed” because they don’t want to have sex often enough.

TheWrap found the blog posts, from the early 2000s, in online archives. In an interview with TheWrap, Uygur apologized and said he deleted the “ugly” posts a decade ago because “I don’t stand by them.”

“The stuff I wrote back then was really insensitive and ignorant,” Uygur said. “If you read that today, what I wrote 18 years ago, and you’re offended by it, you’re 100 percent right. And anyone who is subjected to that material, I apologize to. And I deeply regret having written that stuff when I was a different guy.”

Uygur said he wrote the posts while he was still a conservative, before he underwent a political transformation into a liberal. His news organization, The Young Turks, now offers left-leaning stories and commentary.

“If someone said that today, I would heavily criticize them on the show and rightfully so, and I have. I’ve criticized myself over the years,” he added. “I had not yet matured and I was still a conservative who thought that stuff was politically incorrect and edgy. When you read it now, it looks really, honestly, ugly. And it’s very uncomfortable to read.”

In an entry from 2000, Uygur complained about not having enough sex while living in Miami: “It seems like there is a sea of tits here, and I am drinking in tiny droplets. I want to dive into the whole god damn ocean,” he wrote. “Obviously, the genes of women are flawed. They are poorly designed creatures who do not want to have sex nearly as often as needed for the human race to get along peaceably and fruitfully.”

In another entry, “Rules of Dating,” Uygur described how fast physical intimacy should progress.

“Women, ignore these at your peril,” he wrote. “Rule 1: There must be some serious making out by the third date. If I haven’t felt your tits by then, things are not about to last much longer. In fact, if you don’t get back on track by the fourth date, you’re done.”

He added: “Rule 2: There must be orgasm by the fifth date.”

In a a post archived in 2003, he wrote about carousing with numerous women in New Orleans while drunk.

“I had one of the best nights of my life at Mardi Gras. I kissed over 23 different women, saw and felt countless breasts, and was in a wonderful drunken stupor thanks to my friend John Daniels,” reads the post.

John Daniels is sometimes used as a nickname for Jack Daniels whiskey. Uygur told TheWrap that all of the behavior he described had been consensual.

The posts were written during the earliest years of Uygur’s career as a journalist on YoungTurk.com — which today redirects to a website for The Young Turks.

Another post from 2004 described a road trip with Uygur and David Koller, now senior vice president of operations at the Young Turks. The post was written in the style of a diary entry. At one point, “Dave” described chatting up some underage teenage girls he called “whores in training.”

“In one small Pennsylvania town we stopped for gas, and while Cenk filled up I went to talk to these three girls who were walking down the road nearby. Turns out they were three teenage girls, whores in training, literally looking for boys to pick them up,” he wrote. “They were around 14-16 and in a few more years will be pretty damn good looking.”

Koller declined to comment on the matter.

“I don’t want to talk about any of that stuff. Thank you for calling,” he told TheWrap by phone before hanging up.

Uygur said while the trip had been real, much of what was described in the entry had been satirical and exaggerated.

“[Koller] wrote in a way that was over-the-top satire and that doesn’t look good,” said Uygur. “Some of the stuff he did in there we didn’t do … We did not proposition any underage women.”

Uygur said the posts in no way reflect his views today, and that The Young Turks encourages a progressive atmosphere where many women hold positions of power. But one former employee, who spoke to TheWrap on condition of anonymity, said Uygur still makes comments that make female staffers uncomfortable.

“Cenk is just a knucklehead. He’s a boy. He talks about women the way I talked when I was 13,” he said. “He’s obsessed with body count — basically how many people you f—ed. This is an important number to him.”

Uygur’s public fondness for Miami women was still on display as recently as 2013, when he tweeted about their “improbable” breasts and butts.

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