Another NYC Comic Subject of Witch Hunt After Barron Trump Joke

Yesterday, we reported that Saturday Night Live writer Katie Rich was indefinitely suspended from the show following the backlash she and NBC received after she tweeted an off-color joke about Donald Trump’s son, Barron. Rich sent out the tweet on Friday; by Saturday, her name was removed from the live broadcast’s credits, and by Monday, she’d been suspended.

It appeared that Rich was the only victim of the internet outrage machine, but now New York comedian Stephen Spinola says he has also been targeted.

On Inauguration Day, Spinola put out a Barron Trump joke of his own that went over badly with the wrong people. Spinola’s tweet, which has since been deleted, read “Barron Trump looks like a very handsome date-rapist-to-be.” What might have elicited a guilty chuckle for some, brought about furious rage for others, although most of the hate wasn’t immediate.

Spinola told me that the majority of the backlash came his way after the news of Katie Rich’s suspension came out. He believes that is the event that prompted a legion of Twitter eggs, and Meme Lords to seek out anyone who was disparaging Barron on Twitter and begin to deluge them with hate. With over 36K followers, Spinola must have made an attractive target.

“Then on Monday, I woke up at 6am to over 800 Twitter notifications and all these people saying stuff on Instagram and Facebook and giving me thumbs down and calling me a rapist on all my YouTube videos – which I still admittedly was having fun with,” said Spinola of when things started to get heated. Then, things got much worse. “But then people were sending me death threats. Saying that if they find me they’ll punch my teeth out. That I need to look over my shoulder everytime I’m in a comedy club. Somebody with my area code found my phone number and harassed me. The CEO of some supplement company sent me an email saying to never step foot in Orlando, FL again. One guy sent me my old address and my Grandmother’s name with the insinuation that he was going to hurt her… she died in 2012.”

It’s a common practice on the internet of answering perceived bullying with more bullying. Death threats, harassment campaigns and potentially career-killing public shaming is commonplace. (In fact just last night, someone on Twitter led a small boycott of our site and shamed us because we were unwilling to denounce someone who had written one interview for us several years ago, but I digress).

More fuel was thrown on the fire when InfoWars, the home of professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, posted an article to their website about Spinola’s tweet, referring to him as a “Comedy Central writer.” The folks who started the change.org petition to get Katie Rich fired updated their terms to also call for Spinola to be fired by Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom. The thing is, Spinola is not, nor ever has been, an employee of the company. He’s contributed a couple tweets to Comedy Central, but has never received a dime from them.

“Comedy Central has had me sign four release forms, three for tweets to be used on their sketch series #CCSocialScene and one for a contest submission for @midnight. And they contacted me to submit stuff for the CC Social Scene videos. I think they used two of my tweets,” says Spinola.

So now, thousands of people have signed a petition to get Spinola fired from a company he’s never actually worked for. The negative PR certainly isn’t doing him any favors with Comedy Central either.

https://twitter.com/Mr_McStevie/status/823556664242618369

While the general course of action after events like these is to delete/make private any social media accounts, Spinola says he doesn’t plan to do that. “I’m too stubborn to just delete my accounts and I don’t believe I should have to,” he says. And while he deleted and apologized for the tweet in question, he doesn’t think that his joke was too far removed from what most comedians are doing every day.

“I say dumb stuff all the time. I’m a comedian. Not even a very successful one. Not a successful one really,” says Spinola. “I make mistakes all the time. I say a lot of tasteless stuff about sharting — but arguably sharts are not tasteless,” he added.

You can follow Spinola on Twitter at @Mr_McStevie.

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Bill Tressler

Bill is a writer and comedy enthusiast from New York. An avid gamer and podcast fan, he strives to always toe the line between charming irreverence and grating honesty.
Bill Tressler
Bill Tressler
Bill is a writer and comedy enthusiast from New York. An avid gamer and podcast fan, he strives to always toe the line between charming irreverence and grating honesty.