Cruz blames staffer for porn link on Twitter
WASHINGTON — Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz found himself on the defensive Tuesday after his personal Twitter account was linked to a pornographic Twitter post, an incident that was circulated widely online and set off a virtual melee on social media.
The former Republican presidential candidate, a social conservative with a large evangelical following, blamed an unnamed staffer who he said had “inadvertently” hit the “like” button on a post for a short pornographic video from the Twitter account @SexuallPosts.
The incident late Monday night quickly sparked a headline in the New York Daily News that read: “Sen. Ted. Cruz likes porn video on Twitter.”
@SexuallPosts tweeted early Tuesday morning at Cruz: “Thanks for watching ted!”
The link to the “offensive post” on Cruz’s account was undone early Tuesday by his staff and reported to Twitter, according to Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier.
However, screen shots of the post continued to circulate online and @SexuallPosts and other online users continued to promote it. Cruz critics, including his former Princeton University roommate, Craig Mazin, had a field day with off-color jokes on Twitter.
‘Not a deliberate act’
Cory Chase, the actress who starred in the two-minute video, “Moms Bang Teens 20,” told HuffPost that she didn’t like that “he watched it for free” and accused him of piracy.
By 10 a.m., the video had surpassed 1 million views, according to Corey Price, vice president of Pornhub Communications, which worked with the video’s distributor, Reality Kings, to make “the video Ted liked available to the masses.”
Cruz called the incident — which happened on his personal campaign account, not his official Senate account — a mistake.
“There are a number of people on the team who have access on the account. It appears that someone inadvertently hit the like button. When we discovered the post, which I guess was an hour or two later, we pulled it down,” Cruz said. “It was a staffing issue. And it was inadvertent. It was a mistake. It was not a deliberate act … It was not malicious.”
Twitter users can “like” posts by clicking on embedded heart icons underneath them, which leaves a trail others can see in their feed or account profile.
While Cruz said his office was “dealing with it internally,” his political organization reported no disciplinary action against any of its staff.
Not the first incident
While the story made the rounds on the internet and on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Cruz, whose campaign ran one of the most sophisticated digital outreach efforts of the Republican presidential primaries, sought to make light of his predicament.
“This is not how I envisioned waking up this morning,” Cruz told Capitol Hill reporters later Tuesday morning. “Although I will say that if I had known that this would trend so quickly, perhaps we should have posted something like this back during the Indiana primary.”
Indiana was the decisive primary that prompted Cruz to bow out in favor of a surging Donald Trump. By then, the two candidates had been involved in an ongoing personal feud — fueled in part by unproven allegations of extramarital affairs bannered in a National Enquirer story that Cruz, a married father of two, blamed on Trump.
The Twitter episode is not Cruz’s first brush with the porn industry — advertent or inadvertent.
One of his presidential campaign ads was pulled last year after it was discovered that it used an actress who had appeared in several softcore porn movies. The actress, Amy Lindsay, later publicly endorsed Trump.
He also made headlines as Texas solicitor general for defending a state law outlawing the sale and promotion of sex toys.