Kevin Durant has some competition for the weirdest fake sports Twitter account in 2017. The Wall Street Journal was curious about the Twitter account @forargument and why it seemed to always be defending NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. There’s a good explanation for it. The account was run by Goodell’s wife. While the name on the account, which has been deleted, was “Jones Smith,” the Journal was able to confirm it was actually run by Jane Skinner Goodell.
“It was a REALLY silly thing to do and done out of frustration—and love,” Mrs. Goodell said in a written statement to the Journal on Thursday. “As a former media member, I’m always bothered when the coverage doesn’t provide a complete and accurate picture of a story. I’m also a wife and a mom. I have always passionately defended the hard-working guy I love—and I always will. I just may not use Twitter to do so in the future!”
The account tweeted 14 times from August until the Journal outed its owner. All of them were in support of the commissioner (or his father, former Republican Senator Charles Goodell) in the face of a story or column that was negative about Goodell. Mrs. Goodell, who married the future NFL commissioner in 1997, retired from working as a news anchor at Fox News in 2010. H/T New York Post
Well, you may recall, back a couple weeks ago when Kevin Durant went through this whole fiasco, I wrote about how common this is for members of the sports world. This is just further proof. My favorite part about this is the way she got caught, but back to that in a second.
First off, Kevin Durant at least runs the dummy defender account himself. He actually knows what he’s talking about and was defending himself. Goodell couldn’t even do that much. $48M a year and the guy can’t even operate his own dummy Twitter account. Scratch that, he definitely doesn’t even run his own Twitter account. But I guarantee you he reads what people are saying about him. Maybe Goodell got scared of the Durant situation, maybe he thought he was being slick trying to avoid that? Or he was just too much of a coward, which would be more in line with the way he runs the NFL, that he had to pass off that guilt trip to his wife?
Durant got caught by a dumb honest mistake. We have multiple Twitter and social media accounts for Bleacher Fan as well as my personal accounts and I admittedly make the mistake of tweeting something from the wrong one before. It happens. Not that I agree with dummy Twitter accounts, but I’m not naive and I’m aware that most people of this stature have them.
Back to my favorite part of the story, how she got ousted. She got caught simply because someone at the Wall Street Journal noticed the ONE AND ONLY Twitter account that was defending Roger Goodell and thought it was strange. Think about that for a second. Out of the hundreds of millions of accounts and billions of tweets sent every year about the NFL, there were so few people defending Roger Goodell that someone was able to pinpoint one single account fairly instantaneously! Twitter is a cesspool of sports comments and opinions. Every hot take from here to hell resides there. Do you know how unpopular you have to be to get absolutely zero people talking about you in a positive light? Your wife’s dummy Twitter account excluded. That’s unanimous hate like I’ve never heard of.
Even Harvey Fucking Weinstein had Lindsey Lohan come to his defense. Harvey Fucking Weinstein. One of the most disgusting and sick individuals out there had more support than Roger Goodell.
Holy shit…that is a bad look.
