The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Offensive tweets imperil careers
Old comments on social media can have big repercussions.
Director James Gunn joked about AIDS patients, rape and having sex with children in a slew of tweets that got him booted from the next “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie.
The stars want Marvel to hire him back.
“Although I don’t support James Gunn’s inappropriate jokes from years ago, he is a good man. I’d personally love to see him reinstated as director of Volume 3,” actor Chris Pratt posted with an open letter he signed along with cast members Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff and Sean Gunn ( James Gunn’s brother).
“We fully support James Gunn,” it begins. “We were all shocked at his abrupt firing last week and have intentionally waited these 10 days in order to think pray, listen and discuss.”
The letter says no one defends Gunn’s “jokes of many years ago” but otherwise makes no mention of the tweets that landed him on the list of celebrities facing selfinflicted professional wounds from ill-considered social media posts.
ABC canceled “Roseanne” in May after Roseanne Barr’s tweet comparing Obama administration official Valerie Jarrett to an offspring of “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.” She later said she was referring to antiSemitism, but the backpedaling didn’t save her job.
More recently, Atlanta Braves pitcher Sean Newcomb has been apologizing after racist, sexist and anti-gay tweets he posted as a teenager started making the rounds.
“It was a long time ago – six, seven years ago – saying some stupid stuff with friends,” he said after Sunday’s game. “I know I’ve grown a lot since then. I didn’t mean anything by it. It was just something stupid that I did a long t imeago.”
After Monday’s game, Newcomb said he had spoken to his teammates about the situation and felt it was important to apologize immediately after the old tweets became news.
“I just really want to apologize,” he sa id. “I know it was hurtful. I just remain very, very remorseful.”
Team and Major League Baseball officials say Newcomb will complete diversity training. He has deleted his Twitter account.
Danica Kombol, a social media strategist and CEO of the Atlantabased Everywhere Agency, doesn’t hold a lot of sympathy for the youthful-indiscretions defense.
“Poor Sean, he was a teenager? I don’t think that’s a valid excuse,” she said, adding that the old posts shouldn’t have caught anyone by surprise. “It’s really incumbent upon brands to do their due diligence before they hire people and really do a complete exploration of their complete digital footprint. It couldn’t have been that hard for the Braves to have found this.”
Metro Atlanta app developer Sal Principato spends much of his professional life online and warns young practitioners to post with the future in mind: “There isn’t anything you can do to be 100 percent safe from any future repercussions based on what you post or tweet. Any machine that touched the data you transmitted could be cached and recovered.”
Gunn, who turns 52 on Sunday, has apologized for his vile tweets, and said he has changed in the years since they were posted. Few of the offending messages can be printed in a family newspaper and they’ve been scrubbed from Gunn’s Twitter accou nt. Internet sleuths have posted screen grabs that will live on forever.
“Just made a joke about (expletive) raping my friend when she was asleep,” reads a tweet from August 2008. An April 2011 post reads, “I want to go big game hunting but know it’s morally questionable. So I’m going to split the difference and go big game raping.”
Several others describe sex acts involving children, some using lewd terms.
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” was headquartered at Pinewood Studios in Fayette County, and work on the next in the series had begun. Reputation Management Consultants CEO Eric Schiffer doubts Gunn will be returning for the third installment.
“Gunn’s comments are so inconsistent with Disney, it would be like killing Mickey Mouse to bring him back and try to mix his brand to what Disney stands for,” Schiffer said. Marvel Entertainment is a Disney subsidiary, and the brand synonymous with family fun wasted litt le time in cutting ties with Gunn over his Twitter past.
“The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James’ Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values, and we have severed our business relationship with him,” Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn said in a statementatthetime.
But Gunn has attracted other high-profile support in addition to the “Galaxy” cast; actress Selma Blair left Twitter in a show of solidarity. Meanwhile, Barr took to Twitter to weigh in.
“I’m disgusted to read all of the support for James Gunn’s pedophile jokes,” she posted. “The same people supported blacklisting me for a joke they didn’t even understand.”