A journalist who was fired earlier this week for joking about death threats aimed at House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, broke his silence Thursday, saying he made a serious “error in judgment.”
“I made a terrible mistake. It had nothing to do with politics — mine or anyone else’s,” former boston.com associate editor Victor Alvarez told the Washington Examiner. “It was a clear error in judgment. I apologized to my superiors yesterday. They decided my actions were inexcusable. They fired me this morning.”
Alvarez got into hot water when he wrote an article that appeared Tuesday titled “Would Anyone Have Noticed if Bartender Succeeded in Poisoning John Boehner?”
He was referring to Michael R. Hoyt, a 44-year-old Ohio man who tended bar at a county club frequented by Boehner. Hoyt was indicted in federal court for making death threats against Boehner.
“If I had any intention of hurting Mr. Boehner, I could have poisoned his wine at Wetherington many, many times,” Hoyt reportedly said in an email to Boehner’s wife.
Hoyt, who was committed to a mental facility in October 2014, later told police that he that he owned a .380 Beretta handgun and that he was “going to shoot Boehner and take off.”
In response to news of the indictment, Alvarez jokingly suggested that Boehner’s alleged drinking patterns would have saved him from being poisoned to death.
“The question is: Would anyone have noticed? Stories about Boehner’s drinking have circulated for years. His drinking inspired a blog called DrunkBoehner, and in 2010 he brought booze back to Washington,” Alvarez wrote. “Had he been poisoned as planned, perhaps his pickled liver could have filtered out the toxins.”
An Associated Press photo that accompanied the article on boston.com bore the caption: “House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, has been known to get hammered from time to time.”
The reaction to the article, which was prominently displayed on boston.com’s front page for nearly 12 hours, was fierce.
“It should be obvious to any sentient human being that an item mocking threats against the Speaker and his family is completely insensitive and inappropriate,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel told the Boston Herald.
Boston.com general manager Corey Gottlieb added an official statement to the offending article: “Last night, an opinion piece was published on Boston.com that has since been adjusted to what is currently on the site.”
“The original column made references to Speaker Boehner that were off-color and completely inappropriate. It reflected the opinions of one of our writers; what it did not reflect, by any standards, were the site’s collective values. Rather than remove any reference to it or pretend it didn’t happen, we are handling it with transparency and self-awareness. We are sorry, and we will do better,” the statement added.
Gottlieb said Alvarez’s article was published without editorial oversight.
— Victor Paul Alvarez (@vpaulalvarez) January 15, 2015
Alvarez went public with the news by tweeting a picture of the underside of a bus.
