MSNBC host Joy Reid opened her show on Saturday morning by saying that although she still "genuinely" doesn't believe she wrote anti-LGBT blog posts that she claims were manipulated, she acknowledges that she had previously held anti-LGBT views and tweeted anti-transgender comments.
"I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me," said Reid on AM Joy. "But I can definitely understand based on things I have tweeted and I have written in the past why some people don't believe me."
"I have not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for. I own that. I get it. And for that I am truly, truly sorry," she added.
Reid said a friend alerted her to the blog posts from 2005 to 2007, in which she'd called CNN's Anderson Cooper "the gayest thing on TV" years before he was publicly out, and written that “most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing."
She said she couldn't "make sense of these posts" and was sure she didn't write them, and so hired cybersecurity experts to see if someone had hacked her former blog or manipulated her words.
On Tuesday, the Internet Archive, an organization that maintains the Wayback Machine, a historical archive of websites, confirmed it had investigated Reid's claims of her blog being changed and found them untrue.
Reid acknowledged this on Saturday.
"I hired cybersecurity experts to see if somebody manipulated my words or former blog. And the reality is they have not been able to prove it," said Reid.
Reid still did not definitively state that she wrote the posts, but acknowledged that it did make sense historically.
"I look back at the ways I talked casually about people and gender identity and sexual orientation and I wonder who that even was," said Reid.
Reid also apologized to conservative host Ann Coulter for tweeting anti-trans comments to her, calling her a "dude," "drag queen" and "shim" in 2010 and 2011.
RT @mediaite Elena Kagan and Ann Coulter Attacked For Physical Appearance http://www.mediaite.com/jabvs FM [k but really, Coulter is a dude]
A Muslim Miss USA? Rush Limbaugh and that Coulter dude's heads to explode in three... two...
"@ricksanchezcnn: i'm going to interview ann coulter tonite , what do u want me to ask her?" /don't you mean "shim?"
I'm sooooo tempted to crack on that Coulter dude right now... @lawrence #strainingforcivility
Sorry @Lawrence. I'm not gonna watch Ann Coulter. I like my drag queens fierce. Not a way to build ratings, my man.
"I want to apologize to the trans community and to Ann. Those tweets were wrong and horrible," said Reid.
The liberal host explained that she'd grown up in a household that had conservative views on the LGBT community and she admitted she had once expressed disappointment when a college friend told her he was gay.
"I can only say that the person I am now is not the person I was then. I like to think I have gotten better as a person over time, that I am still growing, that I'm not the same person I was 10 or five or even one year ago. and I know that my goal is to try to be a better person and a better ally," said Reid.
She said she wanted to use the controversy as a discussion for how hurtful speech can "imperil marginalized communities," before chatting with a panel of prominent LGBT Americans.