Saturday’s bombshell from Shaun King (not the quarterback) of the New York Daily News has sparked plenty of criticism and scrutiny of Peyton Manning. Appearing on The Dan Patrick Show, Jason Whitlock of FOX Sports has applied some criticism and scrutiny to Shaun King.
“The guy that wrote this story for the New York Daily News, he’s not a journalist,” Whitlock said. “He’s a race hustler from Twitter, from the Black Lives Matter movement who stirs racial controversy to elevate himself. Listen, the guy’s been busted. First of all, he’s white and presenting himself as black. He said that as a child in high school he was allegedly attacked by a group of white people because he was black. Well, he wasn’t black and there were people saying that wasn’t why he was attacked and there’s no proof of it. He said that it was the first hate crime in Kentucky or whatever.
“I looked into this all at the time because I interviewed this guy for a job at The Undefeated months ago,” Whitlock said, referring to the microsite he was hired to develop at ESPN. “And after interviewing him I was like, ‘Holy cow.’ There’s so much suspicious, skeptical stuff to this guy that we walked away from this guy and looked into the stories he told us, and we couldn’t find proof of them.”
It’s not the first time King has been accused of faking his race. An item from the New York Daily News, the publication that currently employs King, addressed the situation last year. King denied that he is misrepresenting his race.
Whitlock also argued that if Manning did what he is accused of doing — “if he sat on a female’s face with his butt and ball” — a teammate would have knocked Manning out. While that may not be the case when it comes to the star quarterback of a major Division I football program, it would be critical to hear detailed testimony from anyone and everyone who witnessed the incident in order to make a reliable decision on what actually happened.
Ultimately, that’s the one thing that this case never received: A trial in open court. The parties chose to settle the case before that could happen, making it necessarily impossible to make a clear decision as to what did or didn’t happen. Whatever King’s motivations, he helped set an inaccurate narrative by presenting the allegations contained in the document released on Saturday not as accusations but as undeniable fact.