A spokesman for ABC News told The Daily Caller on Monday that an influx of emailed pornography led the network to close down an email account and several social media profiles belonging to an editorial producer, in the days following the Friday mass-murder at a Connecticut elementary school.
“We’ve had to change all of her accounts,” ABC News Senior Vice President Jeffrey Schneider said of Nadine Shubailat in a voicemail message left Monday morning.
Shubailat sent tweets Friday to at least two people she hoped to book for interviews because they had personal connections to families with children at the Sandy Hook School.
One of them now famously replied, “Eat a dick.” (RELATED: Reporters go full-on vulture tweeting friends, family of Connecticut massacre targets)
TheDC reported early Monday morning that Shubailat’s Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ accounts were taken offline after those tweets went viral beginning Friday afternoon.
“We took those down,” Schneider said Monday during a follow-up phone call.
He told TheDC that Shubailat had received “400 horrible, pornographic messages” from members of the public, and one message that she interpreted as a threat to her young son.
“It said, ‘His body should be covered with the blood that’s on your hands,'” Schneider recalled angrily. He said the message included a photograph of her son from a publicly accessible portion of her personal Facebook profile.
By Monday afternoon that profile — which was still online early in the morning — was also deleted. (RELATED: Vulture-tweeting ABC producer disappears from social media after Conn. massacre)
Despite broad coverage from Gawker, Salon.com, the video news service Newsy, an article on the social-media website giant Reddit that attracted more than 1,300 comments, and tweets from all over the world, Schneider claimed Monday in a voicemail message that he was certain it was readers of The Daily Caller who harassed his broadcast producer.
“We had to change her email and she had to change her Facebook page because of the unbelievably vile and horrible threats she received after you posted your story,” he said. “Your readers jammed her with porn sites, death threats against her son and other things. So that’s why that happened.”
Schneider did not respond when TheDC noted during a phone interview that Shubailat included her own ABC News email address in the text of her controversial tweets.
He did, however, defend her actions on press-freedom grounds. Shubailat angled for interviews Friday via Twitter during the early, chaotic hours after the shooting — when many parents with children at the school didn’t know whether their sons and daughters were alive.
“Do you want us to wait until the police and the government releases that information?” Schneider asked. “I can’t believe that’s the kind of country you want to live in.”
Schneider did not mention the on-camera interview ABC News correspondent George Stephanopoulos conducted Friday with Connecticut State Police Lieutenant Paul Vance, the chief law-enforcement spokesman in the days following the Newtown, Conn. shooting.
Schneider also accused TheDC of reporting falsely that the network had fired Shubailat over the resulting controversy. “I certainly hope you’ll either be taking down or amending your story about Nadine being fired,” he said in one voicemail message, “which is self-evidently just a lie. … Nadine very much works here.”
TheDC never reported that the ABC producer’s employment at the network was over. Monday morning’s article carried a subheadline reflecting that she was “still on ABC payroll, but not on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+.”
The article’s first paragraph read, in part, “ABC denies Nadine Shubailat has been fired for soliciting interviews online from panicked people.”
During a news conference Monday, Lt. Vance implored reporters and other news bureau staffers to leave affected families alone as they grieved.
“We’ve been asked by the family members to ask the members of the press to respect their privacy and to please leave them alone at this time,” Vance said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. “I’m pleading with you, as you know this is an extremely heartbreaking, difficult thing for these folks to endure. Please abide by their request.”
“Literally, the word is ‘plea,'” he added, according to Canada’s CTV television network. “Many of the families have asked to please afford them their privacy as they go through this terrible, terrible tragedy.”
Despite hosting a website home page that includes extensive coverage of the Sandy Hook School shooting, ABC News has not reported on those remarks from Vance’s Monday press scrum.
