Axios reporter Alexi McCammond, who on Wednesday made public inappropriate comments said to her by former NBA star Charles Barkley, has apologized for inappropriate tweets she wrote nearly a decade ago.
“Today I was reminded of some past insensitive tweets, and I am deeply sorry to anyone I offended. I have since deleted those tweets as they do not reflect my views or who I am today,” McCammond tweeted Wednesday afternoon.
In the tweets, written in late 2011 and early 2012 when McCammond was a freshman in college, McCammond made disparaging jokes about Asians. They have been deleted, but screenshots can be seen here.
Earlier, Barkley apologized for telling McCammond, “I don’t hit women but if I did, I would hit you.”
“My comment was inappropriate and unacceptable,” the NBA player-turned-commentator said in a statement released through his employer, Turner Sports. “It was an attempted joke that wasn’t funny at all. There’s no excuse for it and I apologize.”
On Tuesday, McCammond tweeted, “Just FYI Charles Barkley told me tonight ‘I don’t hit women but if I did I would hit you,’ and then when I objected to that he told me I ‘couldn’t take a joke.’”
She followed that up by explaining why she broke an off-the-record “agreement” to share the story, then posted statistics about physical abuse by intimate partners in America.
McCammond responded to the statement from Turner Sports’ public relations team Wednesday, writing, “The comments Charles Barkley made to me are not acceptable. Threats of violence are not a joke, & no person deserves to be hit or threatened like that. Silence only allows the culture of misogyny to fester. And those kinds of comments don’t merit off-the-record protections.”