(Suddenly, the “Bones Knows” cell phone case has become the greatest MMA gag-gift of the year. Buy it here on eBay.)
Last week, Jon Jones lost his phone, a mysterious homophobic hacker found it, and then proceeded to fire gay slurs at a Swedish teenager on Instagram under Jones’s identity. At least, that’s the story Jones and his manager Malki Kawa tried to feed us. It seemed fishy from the beginning, and it probably doesn’t help that Jones has now decided to edit his story a little bit.
As Jones claims in a new interview with Newsday‘s Mark LaMonica, a member of Jones’s social media team sent the messages from his account, possibly unwittingly, and this all happened while Jones was in fact trying to get a new phone, because he lost his old one, though that had nothing to do with the alleged “hack.” Got it? From the Newsday article:
Jones said he was at the store that day getting a new phone, and Kawa couldn’t reach him. Kawa said that when he finally did get through to Jones, he asked Jones if he wrote the offensive comments. Jones had no idea what Kawa was even talking about, he said. Kawa then sent Jones screengrabs of what had been posted to his Instagram account.
Jones said the comments came from someone who worked for the company he works with to enhance his presence in social media. It is the same company, Jones said, that helped get more than 1 million likes to his Facebook page.
“One of the guys that’s working for us took it into his own hands to reply to the fans some negative stuff,” Jones said. “I don’t know if the dude thought he was logged in under his name or if he knew he was logged in under my name. By the time I found out all that stuff had happened, it had been on the Internet for hours.”
Jones said that person no longer works on his social media team and that he has changed all his passwords.
Social media is tricky when you’re a celebrity. On one hand, outsourcing your tweeting and instagramming to a private firm makes sense, because who has time for that shit? (We already knew that Georges St-Pierre “never tweet once in my life.”) On the other hand, rogue social media managers have so much power to destroy their clients’ reputations that it doesn’t seem worth it. Going forward, it might be best for people like Jon Jones to, you know, not hire other folks to speak for them in the first place.
Anyway, “my social media guy did it and he’s been fired” is the new “my phone got hacked.” You buying this?