Entire staff at Deadspin fired months after they smeared 9-year-old Chiefs fan as a racist
Just five months after Deadspin tried to smear a 9-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan as a racist, all of the sports media outlet’s employees have been fired as a part of a buyout.
Employees received an email announcing the sale, and some were told at a meeting before their access to the company’s digital resources was cut off.
“Recently we were approached by the European firm Lineup Publishing expressing interest in purchasing Deadspin to add to their growing media holdings,” the email read in part.
Other employees posted about the decision on social media.
“So we just got half an hour’s notice that Deadspin has been sold to a European startup and they’re not taking any staff. Already locked out a company slack and our laptops,” posted Julie DiCaro on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Deadspin was excoriated by many after it tried to misrepresent the costume worn by a young fan of the Kansas City Chiefs as “blackface.” Critics immediately slammed the outlet by pointing out that they had used a misleading photo only showing one side of the child’s face and not the other, which was colored in red.
In February, the family of the boy named Holden Armenta filed a defamation lawsuit against Deadspin. The Armenta family said they have received “a barrage of hate, including death threats” as a result of the article.
“It intentionally painted a picture of the Armenta Family as anti-Black, anti-Native American bigots who proudly engaged in the worst kind of racist conduct motivated by their family’s hatred for Black and Native Americans,” read the lawsuit.
The family also pointed out that the boy’s grandfather was on the board of the Chumash Tribe in Santa Ynez, California. The lawsuit asks for unspecified damages.
The outlet changed the headline and added an editor’s note while changing out the photograph in favor of one of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. The writer also protected his account on X after bizarrely accusing his detractors of being racist against Mexicans.
As a final insult, the email about the action also misspelled Deadspin.
“While the new owners plan to be reverential to Deadpin’s unique voice, they plan to take a different content approach regarding the site’s overall sports coverage,” they wrote.
Here’s more about the Deadspin debacle:
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