No Jumper host Adam22 explains his interview and email correspondence with Milo Yiannopoulos
The podcast host allegedly suggested that the far-right personality “investigate” a journalist who accused her partner of assault.
Adam Grandmaison a.k.a. Adam22, host of the popular hip-hop podcast No Jumper, has issued a statement on his inclusion in a new Buzzfeed piece on Breitbart and the far right, including former editor Milo Yiannopoulos.
Grandmaison's statement seems to confirm Buzzfeed's story, which claimed that he had suggested to Yiannopoulos over email that he "investigate a journalist who had accused her ex-boyfriend of physical abuse." Grandmaison told Buzzfeed over email that he was trying to look out for someone he thought was being treated unfairly; Grandmaison told the website that he "didn't intend for [Milo] to write about it," and according to his statement, Yiannopoulos never pursued the story.
Yiannopoulos has been routinely accused of targeted harassment. He was permanently suspended from Twitter in July 2016 for his attacks on comedian Leslie Jones. Two Berkeley students accused Milo of doxxing them after they spoke out in protest of anti-immigrant and LGBTQ graffiti scrawled on the campus, allegedly by his supporters.
An interview with Yiannopoulos, which Grandmaison says he "regrets," was posted by the No Jumper YouTube page on July 2016 – "I didn't even know where his career was gonna go from there at the time," Grandmaison says. Yiannopoulos was fired from Breitbart in February 2017 after video surfaced in which he appeared to condone certain acts of pedophilia. "I was pretty fuckin' naive," Grandmaison says. "I didn't even really realize how evil Breitbart's intentions for the world was."
(Grandmaison says that the interview came "way before [Donald] Trump" — while he could be referring to election day 2016, Trump announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015, a year before the interview was posted.)
The statement concludes with Grandmaison saying that he has reached out to the woman who he tipped off to Yiannopoulos; he claims that another person had given him false information about the alleged domestic violence incident.
"I have to offer my apologies," Grandmaison says in his recorded statement. "I would never want anyone to think I have any sympathies for the alt-right. I've been a liberal my entire life."
When contacted by The FADER, Grandmaison issued the following statement:
that was one of only 2 emails i ever sent milo after i interviewed him. the other was to say sorry you got banned on twitter.
i feel like i said a lot of what i had to say in that response video. i guess the main thing i want to emphasize is just that i don't agree with milo on any of his typical talking points and that i only sent him a link to a story because he had asked me to after i interviewed him. it was a private conversation about how i felt a black man had been treated unfairly by the media after being accused of abuse by a white woman. i am acquaintances with both of them and specifically told milo it wasn't a tip, just a link to the full story on something we had been discussing off camera
i understand even emailing him about something like that is suspect. i just want to reiterate that i don't have any alt right beliefs and that the story i sent him was about a person of color i felt was being wronged. although having spoken to the victim at length this morning i now realize i was going off bad information.