Earlier this week Portland Trail Blazers forward Al-Farouq Aminu came under scrutiny as homophobic tweets from 2010 and 2011 surfaced as part of a larger collection of older twitter submissions by NBA players.
Today Kevin Arnovitz of ESPN posted a response from Aminu during which he said the contents of the tweets "saddened" him but that he disavowed authoring them.
On content:
"I hope it didn't offend anyone or that anyone thought that those are my ideas or my thoughts or anything like that. I'm saddened by it. I know people that are [gay] and family members that are [gay]."
On how they got onto his account:
Aminu claimed that during approximately the first two years his Twitter account was active, it was hacked on more than one occasion. He said he was an infrequent user of social media and that peers would notify him that suspicious tweets had appeared on his timeline. Asked if he made a point to review his timeline after learning his account had been corrupted, Aminu said he didn't.
"I didn't pay it much mind," Aminu said. "I just changed my password and information."
Arnovitz's article contains background information and more quotes from Aminu.