Former UFC and WWE star Ronda Rousey issued a lengthy apology on Twitter on Friday for posting a Sandy Hook truther video a month after the December 2012 mass shooting that killed 26, including 20 first-graders.
“Eleven years ago, I made the single most regrettable decision of my life. I watched a Sandy Hook conspiracy video and reposted it on twitter,” Rousey began the apology, which came after she ignored multiple questions during a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” to promote her upcoming graphic novel.
ICYMI
The video that she posted was one of the many bits of misinformation put out by the army of far-right knuckle-draggers who have perpetuated the claim that the shooting was staged with crisis actors as a pretext to government action to take away people’s guns.
The person most tied to the conspiracy theory, the discredited far-right broadcaster Alex Jones, lost defamation cases in Texas and Connecticut, the latter resulting in a $1.4 billion judgment.
Rousey claimed in her apology that she didn’t believe what she had seen in the video that she posted online, and “quickly realized my mistake and took it down, but the damage was done.”
She then made the odd claim that “by some miracle it seemingly slipped under the media’s radar,” that she was never asked about the post, and that’s why she never spoke about it again.
That’s odd because there are scores of articles dating back to that time addressing the comments, most calling on her to address the matter, and it’s odd also because she did actually make two half-hearted attempts at issuing an apology, the first a mealy-mouthed “I just figure asking questions and doing research is more patriotic than blindly accepting what you’re told,” the second the classic non-apology about not meaning “to insult or hurt anyone, sorry if anyone was offended.”
Another odd claim from the apology posted on Friday: that she’d wanted to include an apology in her last memoir, Our Fight, published earlier this year, “but my publisher begged me to take it out, saying it would overshadow everything else and do more harm than good.”
Not sure who the publisher is, but the old saying about selling books, which applies to selling UFC matches and WWE matches as well, is, controversy sells.
She hinted at her real motivations for trying to bury the story in her Friday tweet: that she was afraid a direct apology would “inform even more people I was ignorant, self-absorbed and tone-deaf enough” to share the conspiracy video in the first place.
“Honestly, I deserve to be hated, labeled, detested, resented and worse for it,” Rousey wrote. “I deserve to lose out on every opportunity. I should have been canceled, I would have deserved it. I still do.”
Another bit of authenticity came in the final paragraph of her missive.
“To anyone that’s fallen down the black hole of bullshit, it doesn’t make you edgy, or an independent thinker, you’re not doing your due diligence entertaining every possibility by digesting these conspiracies. They will only make you feel powerless, afraid, miserable and isolated. You’re doing nothing but hurting others and yourself. Regardless of how many bridges you’ve burned over it, stop digging yourself a deeper hole, don’t get wrapped up in the sunk-cost fallacy, no matter how long you’ve gone down the wrong road, you should still turn back.”
What we have here is, she didn’t realize right away that she’d made a mistake, like she tried to claim earlier in the apology, but at some point, her thinking did evolve.
Now, to the actual apology:
“I apologize that this came 11 years too late, but to those affected by the Sandy Hook massacre, from the bottom of my heart and depth of my soul, I am so sorry for the hurt that I caused. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain you’ve endured, and words cannot describe how thoroughly remorseful and ashamed I am of myself for contributing to it. I’ve regretted it every day of my life since and will continue to do so until the day I die.”
As much as you might want to take Rousey at face value on this, keep in mind that this whole issue came back to light during a promotional event for a Kickstarter campaign that she started to raise money to help her publish her upcoming graphic novel.
So, appreciate the sentiment, appreciate the actual apology, 11 years too late or what, but this smacks of PR 101 damage control.
Share
Chris Graham
