Ken Jennings Ableist tweets threaten ‘Jeopardy’ hosting

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This is not the first time Jennings has been cited for cruelty in her tweets.

Twenty-four hours after Sony Pictures Television announced that “Jeopardy” fan favorite Ken Jennings would be one of many hosts invited to take the popular quiz again in January following the death of Alex Trebek, a four-year-old tweet came back on putting a cloud on the occasion.

Following the announcement of Jennings’ concert last night, actress and activist Yvette Nicole Brown posted a tweet decrying the casting choice. When asked why she directed them to a tweet posted by Jennings on September 22, 2014 where he posted: “Nothing sadder than a sexy person in a wheelchair.” Jennings never condemned his actions back then, and as of this writing, the tweet is still on his timeline. (Neither Jennings nor Sony Pictures Television responded to the comments.)

It wasn’t until 2018, in response to someone who retweeted his comments, that Jennings responded on Twitter, saying, “I’ve never done a public flogging for this, but I apologized personally. to anger / hurt people who have contacted personally. It was such an inane joke it meant something very different in my head [and] I regret the simple capacitist reading of it.

This is not the first time Jennings has been cited for being cruel in her tweets. In 2015, he tweeted: “It can’t be a good sign that all the fans who saw the new Star Wars movie died soon after,” in response to the death of Daniel Fleetwood, a fan of “Star Wars ”died of cancer and wanted to see“ Star Wars: The Force Awakens ”before he died. Two years later, Jennings was in the limelight again after responding to then-11-year-old Barron Trump when she saw the image of Kathy Griffin holding a bloody Trump mask with “Barron Trump saw a very long tie on a pile of expired deli meats in a dumpster. He thought it was his father and his little heart breaks. And in 2018, he described an elderly woman mourning her late son saying, “This terrible MAGA grandmother is my favorite person on Twitter.”

It’s unlikely that this tweet, or anything Jennings said on Twitter, will affect her stance with “Jeopardy,” but given the fact that Jennings never deleted the tweet or made any attempt to openly apologize, resurfacing comments aren’t the best introduction to his guest takeover. This is doubly unfortunate because it is not known if “Jeopardy” even had a wheelchair user as a candidate. (That’s not to say they didn’t have any disabled competitors. In 1999, Eddie Timanus, who is blind, earned $ 69,700 playing the game.)

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