Kevin Durant apologizes for ‘childish’ tweets, denies using fake accounts
It was either perfect or terrible timing, depending on your perspective.
A day after Kevin Durant lit up the internet with Twitter drama, he took the stage at San Francisco’s TechCrunch Disrupt for a talk about being “in control of your own brand.”
The session opened by addressing the enormous cloud looming over the Warriors star: Is he using fake accounts on social media to fight back against his critics? After an awkward pause, Durant came just short of admitting he did, in fact, do just that.
“I happened to take it a little too far,” Durant said. “That’s what happens when I get into those basketball debates.”
“That was childish, that was idiotic, all those type of words,” he added.
Durant also denied using a fake Instagram account — he said he has a private account he uses to share with family and friends — but didn’t comment on Twitter specifically.
The controversy erupted Sunday when two strange tweets from Durant’s official Twitter account responded to another tweet asking for “one legitimate reason for leaving [Oklahoma City] other than getting a championship.”
Durant’s account responded twice, both in third-person voice, throwing Thunders head coach Billy Donovan and his former teammates under the bus. The first read, “He didn’t like the organization or playing for Billy Donovan. His roster wasn’t that good, it was just him and russ.”
The second tweet read, “Imagine taking russ off that team, see how bad they were. Kd can’t win a championship with those cats.”
The tweets triggered the Internet hive to suspect Durant himself accidentally posted the official account tweets from a fake one he set up to defend himself. That suspicion went into overdrive when the tweets disappeared and the account read, “I just deleted it.”
“It was tough to deal with yesterday,” Durant said at TechCrunch. “I was really upset with myself.”
Durant said he apologized to Donovan and plans to “scale back a little bit” on social media “and just focus on basketball.”
Conference organizers billed the 20-minute “fireside chat” as a chance for Durant and his agent Rich Kleiman to “talk about what it means to be in control of your own brand — from investment, to management, to media.”
