MSNBC host Joy Reid said on Saturday that she has no proof her now-defunct blog was hacked to include homophobic posts recently surfaced by an anonymous Twitter user, and she again apologized for views she'd expressed in the past.
"I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me," Reid said in an on-air monologue on her show "AM Joy" on Saturday. "But I can definitely understand based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past why some people don't believe me. I have not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for. I own that. I get it."
Earlier this month, Twitter user @Jamie_Maz, whose identity is not publicly known, published several screenshots purported to have been acquired through the Internet Archive of Reid's one-time blog, Reid Report. Reid apologized in December for "insensitive" blog posts from roughly a decade prior.
In the newly exposed posts, Reid appears to defend homophobic comments made by former NBA player Tim Hardaway and a U.S. Marine general, among other discussions of homosexuality.
Reid didn't apologize for the posts at the time, asserting that they are not her words.
In a statement earlier this week, Reid said an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from her blog to "include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology."
"Frankly, I couldn't imagine where they'd come from or whose voice that was," Reid said Saturday.
Reid, who joined MSNBC in 2014, says she hired cybersecurity experts to see if somebody had manipulated her words or her former blog. "The reality is they have not been able to prove it," she said.
Earlier this week, Reid's attorney said they 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 Reid.
It is alleged the Twitter user who exposed the new blog posts was able to find them through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a service that tracks, collects and stores old web pages.
The Internet Archive said in a statement they have reviewed their archives and "found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions" of the blog. They say they have declined to take down the archives as per request from Reid's lawyers.
Reid’s blog posts were written before she joined NBC News in 2011.
MSNBC is a part of NBC News, which is owned by NBCUniversal.
