Why I Must Defend the Dishonest Attacks on My Character & Work

Shaun King
Jul 6, 2017 · 23 min read
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Let me start out with the positive.

I get a lot of love. Online and off, through emails and comments on social media, as well as on the streets, on the subway, and out about in New York and beyond, y’all give me more than enough love. I see it. I hear it. I feel it. I appreciate it.

I get so much love at home, though, from my wife and five babies, that if I never got a single compliment outside of the house, I’d be good. I don’t live for the praise, or fish for it, because the people who know me and love me give it to me all the time.

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I have a crew and I go out of my way to keep them away from the drama that comes along with being connected to me. I have my crew at the New York Daily News. I have my crew at the Tom Joyner Morning Show. I have my crew at the Young Turks. I have my Bernie Sanders campaign crew. I have my crew from Morehouse, Spelman, and the AUC. I have my hometown Day 1 crew from Kentucky. I have my Atlanta crew. I have activist networks that I’ve helped build in cities all over the country that host me and support me wherever I go. I have my Facebook crew and my Twitter crew. I have my Injustice Boycott crew. I have my crew of pastors that keep me encouraged.

I said all of that to say that I am not a lone ranger — far from it. People keep saying that I’m not accountable to anybody but what they really mean is that I’m not accountable to them. I have bosses, editors, attorneys, mentors, advisors, committees, coaches, peers, friends, colleagues, professors, and family members who all hold me to a very high standard. If you think I’m a lone ranger — and go at this work alone, without accountability or supervision, that’s the first sign to me that you don’t know me and that you’ve probably never met me before. I have so many people that I actually answer to and report to on a daily basis that it’s hard to keep up. I’m at a point in my life where it would be damn near impossible to pull bullshit or to mistreat people in any way.

So I have to address several key lies being told about me. They aren’t even rooted in half-truths. They are complete fabrications from top to bottom. They’ve all been debunked over and over and over again, but every few months a fresh person thinks they’ve discovered something dirty on me and decides to just throw caution to the wind and go for it. Each time I debunk the lies. Each time they are debunked, the accusers just move on like they never said anything in the first place. It’s a vicious cycle and a weird sign of the times that we are in. Let me just address them all one by one. Three primary lies are being told about me.

1. I Have Never Used or Abused or Stolen from Victims of Police Brutality

I run the risk of exposing my heart a bit here, but nothing hurts me or burns me up more than this lie. It is a complete and total fabrication — first started by white supremacists who are now all banned permanently from Twitter, then picked up by everyday people who simply did not know they were being duped into believing something that is not true in any shape, form, or fashion.

First off, I am abundantly proud of the work I have done and continue to do with families affected by police brutality. It’s hard to know what progress we’ve made over the past few years, but the work I’ve done directly with families has given some peace of mind to know that I’ve played even a small role in easing the pain they are experiencing. Since the start of this new movement in 2014, I have now raised over $5 million for victims of police brutality and state violence. I have not received a single penny from any of this. I am not paid by the attorneys for the families and will never be paid by them. I don’t get a percentage of the funds when families get settlements that I helped fight for. When families ask me to speak at events or rallies, I don’t ask for or receive an honorarium. If they offered, I would turn it down.

Not a single victim of police brutality, or a single family affected by police brutality, or a single charity fighting police brutality, including the people and charities in Standing Rock that I have supported, have ever said, on the record or off, privately or publicly, that I have defrauded them of a single penny. Nobody, not a single soul on this earth, in this movement, is owed a penny from me and has ever been owed a penny from me. Not only that, but never, for a single day, has money that I’ve helped to raise ever even been in my possession. When I raise funds for families, it is through links and websites and programs they create. They simply send me the link and I share that link on Twitter, on Facebook, in my Instagram bio, with every celebrity and wealthy person I know, I share that link with the hundreds of thousands of people on our email list, but I never even have access to those fundraising pages. I don’t write the copy. I don’t have the passwords. And I go out of my way to stay several protective layers away from the money — knowing full well that people are going to lie on me and lie on these poor families.

Anyone saying that I have misused, abused, or even touched funds intended for victims of police brutality are lying. The lie is both unfounded and illegal. I have stated this enough publicly, even providing the names and phone numbers and emails of every person I’ve ever helped raise funds for, that it has crossed a point where anyone still saying this is breaking the law. This is libel. It’s criminally negligent and deeply unethical.

I implore you to reject not only this false claim, but anybody who is making it. Anybody who says that I have stolen or even touched a single dime in this movement is lying and they know it. Do not trust them. It is completely baseless and damaging. It not only damages me, but it damages the movement to have such an unethical lie floating out there. It also hurts the families and wastes so much of their precious time and emotional energy.

Secondly, people are claiming that I am raising money for and profiting off of the grassroots efforts that I am leading. Again, this is a complete fabrication. I am not raising a single dime for the efforts that I am leading and have not raised a single dime for the Injustice Boycott — which was tremendously effective — or for Woke Folks — the grassroots effort we are launching later this year. We held events in Seattle and Oakland and New York at no cost. We fought for and helped win huge reforms here in New York and in Seattle at no cost. In fact, I’ve spent thousands of dollars of my own income to pull off our work. We don’t even have private donors. We aren’t funded by George Soros. Everything we do, we do for free. And that’s hard to do, but we do it.

In 2014 donors gave a total of $5,857 to the justice work I was leading. In 2015, they gave $9,723. When I closed down those charities to focus on journalism, we returned every single one of those donations to the donors who gave the funds. 161 donors gave those funds and we gave back every single dime. Here are the donors who received those funds saying publicly that they received those funds back two years ago. I never personally benefitted from those funds and wouldn’t need to.

This is embarrassing to say, but I work — I work a lot. I work full-time for the New York Daily News and they pay me well. I also work 8–10 days per month for the Tom Joyner Morning Show and Tom takes good care of me. I woke up at 5am and did the show today. I work 10–12 days per month for The Young Turks and they take good care of me. I also travel and speak to universities and businesses am paid well for my work. I also do freelance work with several different businesses. I probably work somewhere around 75–80 hours per week. My wife is also an award-winning educator with over a decade of teaching experience. We aren’t hurting for money and the little bit of extra we have is part of why I am able to do the justice work that I do.

I said all of that to say that I work my ass of, day in and day out, to make a living and provide for my family and would never steal a single penny from victims of injustice — out of need or greed or spite. If a single victim or family affected by injustice has been wronged by me in this way, who are they? Name them? Where are their accounts? Do you know how much trouble I’d be in right now if I helped raise money for a family and they never received it? If you are saying I am doing this, you are breaking the law. It is a lie. You don’t see victims of families saying I’m doing this because they don’t exist. If they did, I’d be arrested for fraud.

Part of why I have such good rapport with families affected by police brutality is because I don’t exploit or use them. I don’t expect anything in return from them. They are often stretched in a million different ways and I work hard to not be a taker in their lives at a time where they simply do not need such a thing.

You don’t have to take my word for it — talk to them or talk to their attorneys yourself.

Talk to the family of Amadou Diallo about me.

Talk to the family of Eric Garner about me.

Talk to the family of Mohammed Bah about me.

Talk to Mike Brown, Sr. about me.

Talk to the family of Trayvon Martin about me.

Talk to the family of Oscar Grant about me.

Talk to the family of Alex Neito about me.

Talk to the family of Kalief Browder about me.

Talk to the family of Jordan Edwards about me.

Talk to Tamir’s mother about me.

Talk to Alton Sterling’s family about me.

Talk to the family of Monroe Bird about me.

Talk to the family of Corey Jones about me.

Talk to the family of Terrence Crutcher about me.

Talk to the family of Radazz Hearns about me.

Talk to Jacqueline Craig and her family about me.

Talk to the people of Standing Rock about me.

I could name a hundred more families right now off the top of my head who I’ve either helped raise funds for or fought tooth and nail for justice for. None of them have ever had a cross word to say about me. Yesterday, I was sent a series of tweets from a woman saying that 15 different black mothers whose children had been affected by police brutality had contacted her saying I had abused them in some kind of way.

I’m sorry to be harsh, but this simply can’t be true. First off, in the online accusations against me it said 15 black mothers said I reached out to them via email to see how I could help them. That has never happened. Not once. Everything about that story is off.

First, every single time I’ve helped a family affected by police brutality, that family or their attorneys reached out to me. I wouldn’t even know how to reach out to families affected by police brutality. Before a case even hits the news or is trending, families and attorneys reach out to me and ask for help. I receive nearly 1,000 different emails and Facebook messages and text messages every single day. Not a single time have I ever sought out a family affected by police brutality to volunteer my help in some kind of way. Never. Not a single time has this happened. Not for a story. Not for anything. They have always found me.

If a family or their representatives reach out to me, and I have time, my answer to them is always yes. Whatever I can do to help them, I do. On my own dime I’ve gone from simply telling the stories of families online, to traveling to meet and support those families, speak at their events and rallies, take questions from the local press for them, and more.

Secondly, I can name every single mother affected by police brutality I’ve ever worked with. I don’t even think I’ve worked directly with 15 total mothers affected by police brutality in the past 3 years. It’s rarely the mom that I work with — particularly in the immediate aftermath of a fatal incident of police violence. It’s a cousin, a friend, an attorney, a brother, a neighbor, an aunt, an in-law — but rarely do I work directly with mothers. They are almost always having to do the hard work of funeral planning or family care that it is rarely them who finds me. I don’t think you could a single mother of a police brutality victim who would say I didn’t worship the ground they walk on with patience, kindness, reverence, warmth, and longsuffering. I’ve never, not a single time, treated a mother of a police brutality victim with anything other than my utmost respect. Sadly, because this lie that I have ever mistreated mothers of police brutality victims has been shared, I’ve asked all of the mothers I’ve ever worked with to speak up to reject this. It’s a waste of their time and mine and I resent being cornered in this way. They will each speak out in the days ahead as they have time.

Furthermore, this person said that 15 different black mothers said I blocked them online after abusing them. Again, this is sad fabrication. This has never happened. Not once. I have never blocked a single family affected by police brutality online. Ever. I would never do that. Last year I had an auto-blocking software that automatically blocked brand new Twitter accounts with zero followers that followed me because people were opening accounts just to harass me. I doubt any mothers were blocked in that way, but the few mothers I worked with I spoke with over the phone, in person, or through email. They would always have a way to find me if they ever happened to be blocked on accident.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, over the past 24 hours I reached out and connected with almost every single family I’ve worked with over the past 3 years. I couldn’t find a single family that even knew this woman making these false accusations, and without fail, every single one of them said they did not contact her and would never, ever say about me the things this woman is saying people said. Of all the families I’ve ever worked with the past 3 years, I’ve had one single family, whose case I’m still helping with today, ask me to slow down and I did. I asked them last night if they had contacted anybody to express concerns, which I knew would be weird, and they said of course not.

Sadly, this leads me to 1 of 2 possible conclusions: this person making false claims against me is either flat out lying — which is both scary and dangerous or perhaps a savvy group of online trolls has duped her into actually believing that I have done what she is saying I have done. And instead of verifying it with the actual families I’ve worked with, advocated for, or written about, she just repeated the fabrications as if they were true because maybe she thought they were. They aren’t.

It’s just not true. I have tremendous relationships with so many families who’ve been affected by police brutality. I see them as my friends. I’d do anything for them.

When these types of lies are told about me, they are not just told about me, the families I’ve helped across the years get dragged into this mess — as white supremacists and others think they smell blood and then start contacting these families looking for some type of dirt to make me look bad. I know this because the families have told me it has already happened to them multiple times — as people pretending to have good intentions — find them — sometimes calling them or texting them and demanding they tell them about their interactions with me. It’s started to happen again in the past 24 hours. These families don’t deserve this foolishness. It’s irresponsible.

Not once has a family had a cross word to say about me, but this bullshit continues anyway — wasting my time and the precious time and energy of families affected by police brutality. It is shameful.

If you repeat it or contribute to these lies, you are shameful. If you share these lies or pretend to believe they are true, you are shameful.

2. I Have Never Used or Abused My Relationships with Victims of Police Brutality for Personal or Monetary Gain

You may have just now gotten to know me, or know about me, but I’ve been rather well known since about 1999. I was Student Government President at Morehouse College and one of the most well known black college leaders in the country. I first appeared on CNN in 1999. That’s 18 years ago. It was that year, as a sophomore in college, that I began organizing against police brutality and the sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine. I was the featured speaker at rallies and marches as a teenager. I literally owned my own bullhorn.

Years and years before the phrase Black Lives Matter was ever coined, my work was featured in every major news outlet in America. Because of my charity work, I had already met or interacted with virtually every celebrity you could think of by 2010. The largest stages I’ve ever spoken on have not been in the past 3 years, but 10 years ago when I spoke to entire arenas as a featured conference speaker. I wrote and published my first book, and received a large advance from Simon and Schuster, on setting and pursuing life goals, before this movement began. I’ve been asked over and over to write a book about this movement and have refused.

I started and sold businesses before you ever heard of me. I received multiple patents for technologies I conceived and helped build before this modern movement ever began. I won several local and national awards for my work in the community a decade ago. I wasn’t as well known then as I am now, but I’ve been known.

In part because of the death threats on my life, I rarely appear in public nowadays. My family prefers it that way. As a husband and father of five, my responsibilities are complex and my family sometimes worries themselves sick that when I leave to speak somewhere that I might not make it home.

I’m not an ambulance chaser — quite the opposite. The most painful emotional experience I have every single day is the fact that hundreds and hundreds of people write me, call me, text me, Facebook me, stop me in person, and even send stacks and stacks of mail to my office at the Daily News practically begging for help with some type of injustice they’ve experienced. I’m not able to keep up. I think I may actually only see about 1% of what gets sent my way. Maybe less. I have no time or space to read or see them all and it crushes me.

Then, when something does capture my attention somehow, I am fully aware that the second I respond to that communication that it not only means I am leaving hundreds of other people behind, but that it means this person I’m responding to has a fresh expectation of how I can help. This is the primary way I learn of stories. I never seek them out — ever. They find me and when I can help, somehow, by sharing their story, or writing about it for the Daily News, or making some phone calls for them, or raising funds for them, I do it. It’s an overwhelming process and I manage it the best way I know how. I don’t have any paid support staff at the Daily News or elsewhere that filter through it all and don’t quite trust online volunteers with people’s sensitive data. People often send me confidential documents and whistleblowing materials and I don’t want anything leaked to harm them. Being forced to make this response today meant that I had to use a hard earned vacation day from the Daily News and take time away from both my family and the very real justice work I do.

I get requests to appear on national television almost every single day. I haven’t accepted a request in well over a year — maybe two. I don’t even remember the last national interview I accepted. I’ve been offered spots on every morning show, every news show, at every time slot available on every network. I don’t even reply. I don’t have time. I get multiple requests to appear on local television stations here in New York and across the country every single day. Unless a family affected by police brutality, or their attorney, specifically asks me to do the request, I don’t even respond to them. Of the hundreds of requests I’ve received to appear on local television in every major city in America, I think I’ve done 3 or 4 in the past 3 years combined. Each of those were special requests from families who wanted their stories more known. I receive several requests per day to appear as a guest on radio stations all over the world — from BBC to CBS to ESPN and every single AM, FM, and XM station and show you can imagine. I don’t even reply to the requests unless a family member or organization asks me to. I’ve become friends with Karen Hunter, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and appear on her XM radio show whenever she asks because she’s my friend.

People saying that I am pimping families for attention or media buzz or hype are completely fabricating this. I’ve been asked to attend around 50 press conferences with families or organizations over the past 3 years. I haven’t done a single press conference — knowing that if I was a part of it, the media would focus on me and not the family or the victims.

I’ve been offered photoshoots with amazing photographers for swanky magazines and websites. I don’t reply and haven’t done any of them. I’ve been offered interviews with pop stars and celebrities, privately, publicly, on stage, and off, and have turned every single one of those opportunities down. Every major news website and newspaper in America regularly asks me for quotes and interviews. I don’t reply.

I generally don’t appear at festivals or film premiers or listening parties — even though I get the invitations every week. I’m not even criticizing the people who do these things, but they aren’t for me.

Celebrities and athletes have offered to send me or my kids autographed items or tickets to their events. Instead of accepting them, I’ve directed those gifts to families affected by police brutality.

I’ve probably come to know about 350 professional athletes and have refused to take pictures with them or talk about my friendships or connections with them — unless that athlete and I mutually decided it would somehow help an issue of injustice we were both fighting against. The same is true for hundreds of entertainers, musicians, actors, authors, etc. I generally don’t do selfies or photos with any of them because I never want it to look like I do what I do for such a thing. I don’t. The only exception to this is probably Colin Kaepernick. I’ve grown to see him as my friend and I’d do anything to help him at this point.

Lastly, people are saying that I am using or abusing families affected by police brutality to advance my career. This is a lie.

Of the 619 articles I’ve written for the New York Daily News, not one of the top 10 most read articles I’ve written was even about police brutality. They never are. A full third of my articles have been about American politics — including Donald Trump. The most shared article I’ve ever written was actually about the former NFL star Peyton Manning. After that, an article I wrote about problematic origins of the Star Spangled Banner. After that was an article I wrote about bigots at a Donald Trump rally.

I wrote a 25 part series on how to solve police brutality. I’m incredibly proud of that series. It took me months to research, prepare, write, and release it. Still, it was in the lower 25% of the most read and shared things I’ve written. My articles on police brutality don’t get shared nearly as much as the articles I write about white privilege or bigotry.

Am I supposed to be ashamed of the articles I write about police brutality? Am I not supposed to promote them, and share them, and get that story out on a national stage? What are we talking about here? This is what I do for a living. I write about injustice.

3. I Have Never Plagiarized Anything a Day in My Life

First and foremost, I am the Senior Justice Writer for the New York Daily News. I have direct supervisors I interact with every single day of the week. I have direct editors, fact-checkers, and attorneys who comb through everything I write for accuracy and integrity. People who do not work for actual news outlets, but just post whatever they want to post on Facebook or Twitter, have no idea what this looks like or the gauntlet every single thing I do must pass through every single day.

As of today, I’ve written 619 articles for the New York Daily News (here they all are) and I stand by each and every one of them without hesitation. My thoughts and feelings may have evolved, but each article I’ve written represented how I felt about the world the day I wrote it. I’m a columnist. That means I get the opportunity to lead with the facts of a story, but then pivot to how those facts make me feel and what I think should be done about those facts.

I have never, not once, ever, intentionally or unintentionally plagiarized a single source for a single story a day in my life. I don’t have to. I’m an opinion writer. Writing comes easy for me. I am blessed to be paid to share my thoughts. I am controversial enough, though, that I am convinced that if the New York Daily News had even a hint that I had plagiarized something, I’d be gone. I get along well with the bosses, and do my work day in and day out, but if anybody caught a whiff of me plagiarizing something, I’d be done.

The lie that I steal other people’s work and claim it for my own is nonsense. It has never happened. It never will happen. Anybody who is saying it has happened is either flat out lying, terribly mistaken, or is being played by somebody to convince them that I have plagiarized something. When my articles are published online for the New York Daily News, they often have as many as a few dozen links and sources. We intentionally go overboard with them. When I cut and paste any text from those articles from the New York Daily News to Facebook, those links no longer work, but are linked to in the original article at the Daily News, which is always linked to in every post I share online.

So that’s that. I have never plagiarized anything a day in my life and I have great peace with this. Anybody who evaluates the full volume will come to the same conclusion.

Now, somebody is also saying they saw me post something on Facebook that they believe I got from their Facebook page and that I shared it without giving them credit. This is not true. I don’t search Facebook for news stories. I never have. I never will. I use an app for Verified Facebook Accounts called “Mentions” and I only see the posts from a few pages I follow and the times people mention my page. First off, I mainly share my own work and articles on my Facebook page. I also share stories from trusted accounts.

Never, not once, did I post something on Facebook, claiming it to be my own, when it wasn’t. This has never happened — ever. I know of just one clear instance where someone is claiming I did this to them and it simply is not true.

In October of 2016, a parent from a local elementary school in suburban Atlanta, where I lived, wrote me and said an employee of their school had been caught calling Michelle Obama a gorilla. The parent sent me screenshots of the employee saying as much. I then tweeted and Facebooked those screenshots that the parent sent me and demanded that the school fire the employee. I had people call the school, email the school, etc. Never, not once, did I know that a young woman in Houston had first found or posted these screenshots. I wasn’t sent those screenshots in that way and had no idea of knowing who they came from. I assumed they came from the mother in the school and that mother clearly wanted me to put the school on blast — which I did.

Days later, the woman from Houston who said she found the screenshots first, said I stole her work and made it my own. I literally couldn’t make sense of it. I even told the woman that I’d be glad to get on the phone with her to talk it out — which I did — from a train station in Philadelphia after speaking for several hours that night. The woman continued to insist that I stole it from her — and that if I hadn’t — I still should’ve given her credit for taking the original screenshot of the Facebook page.

Never, until I saw people who were completely pissed that I “stole” content from this woman’s Facebook page, did I even know that the content came from her page at all. Nobody ever mentioned that to me. The mother that sent me that screenshot clearly wasn’t thinking about it. I apologized anyway, over the phone, directly to the woman who posted the content originally — and told her that had I known she took the screenshot I would’ve made sure other people knew.

Again, my goal wasn’t to advance myself or my name or my Facebook page or Twitter account — my goal was to hold a bigoted educator accountable and for her to be fired. It is very difficult, almost impossible, to know where random screenshots of public Facebook posts come from. I never even considered that someone would view such a screenshot from Facebook as proprietary and want or need credit for them.

The other claims I am seeing are twilight zone type stuff where people, who are very serious, say that they commented on my Facebook page and that I stole their comment and wrote an article based on their comments. In any given week, my Facebook page receives 450,000 comments — literally. Last month over 100 million people engaged with my page in one way or another. Neither here nor there, I can safely say I have never stolen a Facebook comment from my page and written an article on it. With tens of millions of comments per year, I see only a tiny fraction of what people are saying. A micro-fraction. If all I did in life was read Facebook comments, it would take me several years to read a month’s worth of comments. It’s humanly impossible to keep up.

Since this movement began, between Daily Kos and the New York Daily News, I’ve now written nearly 1,200 articles. I write a new article every single day. All of them well sourced and original. However, it is very possible, after writing 1,200 articles, that I’ve said something that you are thinking. It is very possible that I’ve even written a thought very similar to something you’ve written or spoken at one time or another. My job is to have my pulse on what needs to be said now, and say it. But I can assure you, my thoughts and my words are my own — now and always. I stake my entire reputation on this every single day.

Lastly, people will continue to say — why in the world do you continue to defend yourself? I have to. The lies do damage to my name, to my work, to my ability to help families in need. These lies do damage to my own family who get asked questions about the lies people spread about me and my work.

I’ve pledged to fight back. For the first time I have secured attorneys who are helping me prepare defamation and libel suits for people who spread lies about me. None of these lies could ever published in a reputable publication because they’d never pass the fact-checking phase. Consequently, they just float around on Facebook and Twitter, but I will not allow it — particularly from verified accounts and people who should be held to a higher standard.

Thank you all for your continued support and encouragement. It means the world.

Let’s keep fighting for justice.

Shaun

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