A Los Angeles Times sports writer has issued a public apology for a column that referred to the Louisiana State University women’s basketball team as “dirty debutantes”—after the ill-advised phrasing drew a very public denunciation from the team’s coach Kim Mulkey.
“Words matter. As a journalist, no one should know that more than me. Yet I have failed miserably in my choice of words,” Ben Bolch wrote in a statement on Monday.
In his Friday commentary previewing a game between LSU and UCLA, Bolch described it as “America’s sweethearts vs. its basketball villains,” and a battle between “good and evil” and “right versus wrong.”
Mulkey—who has been in the spotlight for threatening legal action against The Washington Post over a recent profile that explored tensions in her family—slammed the piece after her team beat the UCLA Bruins Saturday.
“There were some things in this commentary, guys, that you should be offended by as women,” she said. “It was so sexist and they don’t even know it.”
The Times later scrubbed some of the language from the piece and added a note that read: “A previous version of this commentary did not meet Times editorial standards.”
Bolch said he waited two days to address it “because I wanted to be as thoughtful as possible in my response to the situation I have created.”
“These are words I have not been asked to write by anyone at my paper, but they need to be expressed so I can own up to my mistake,” he wrote.
“I tried to be clever in my phrasing about one team’s attitude, using alliteration and not understanding the deeply offensive connotations or associations. I also used metaphors that were not appropriate.
“Our society has had to deal with so many layers of misogyny, sexism, racism and negativity that I can now see why the words I used were wrong. It was not my intent to be hurtful, but I now understand that I terribly missed the mark.”
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