A well-known hockey blogger has been fired from at least one of his writing gigs after he allegedly sent creepy Twitter direct messages to more than 20 women.
The alleged DMs came from Steve Lepore, a hockey blogger who wrote for Awful Announcing, Rolling Stone, and Sirius XM, according to his Twitter account, which has since been deleted.
Toni McIntyre, a copywriter and hockey fan, first revealed that she received DMs from Lepore in a vague tweet posted on Saturday. She didn’t initially mention him by name.
a guy who used to send me creepy DMs just got fired for sending lots of women creepy DMs. https://t.co/sdJ4CQNH0b (ht @Lahlahlindsey)
— Megan Greenwell (@megreenwell) December 1, 2014
According to the Storify, Lepore removed his writing credits from his Twitter profile. His author page for SB Nation directs to a 404 error page. Rolling Stone and Sirius XM have yet to make statements, but Awful Announcing, which covered a similar story involving former Yahoo Sports writer Harrison Mooney, quickly announced that it cut ties with Lepore.
“This is personally and professionally painful to me on many levels, the largest one being that Steve’s conduct left many feeling uncomfortable and disenfranchised by an all too common theme these days of insensitive, harassing, or oblivious poor treatment of women by men,” Bloguin CEO and Awful Announcing General Manager Ben Koo wrote. “I want to personally apologize for this behavior as well as applaud those who have had courage to share their personal experiences. I’m sorry, you deserve better, and I hope continued discussion will be a catalyst for change going forward.”
Despite asking him to stop messaging her multiple times, Lepore still sent McIntyre what appeared to be an apology email after Awful Announcing posted the statement on his termination.
so sick of these reminders that my friends and i become targets just by being women and doing our fucking jobs.
— Megan Greenwell (@megreenwell) December 1, 2014
H/T Megan Greenwell | Photo via Beatrice Murch/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed
