Mina Kimes blasts @NFL_DovKleiman account

The takes over the @NFL_DovKleiman X/Twitter account went in an unexpected direction Thursday. This one involved a massive “fake person” and “click money” dunk from ESPN analyst Mina Kimes, then some criticisms of her as a “DIE hire” (sic) from an apparent fan of the account, and then quite the response from her. Here’s how that specifically played out (with context to follow for those who see the previous sentence as a collection of strange words):

Okay, back to that context. On “Kleiman,” that account joined X/Twitter in 2009, but became more and more famous as an aggregator of NFL information in the past few years. Last year, that led to WFAN’s Boomer Esiason and Gregg Giannotti (amongst others) questioning the identity of the person behind the account. And Esiason even relayed a rumor of the account operator being a “ plant ” for Tom Brady (presumably, someone covertly placed rather than a type of vegetation).

After that, a man describing himself as Kleiman spoke to Ryan Glasspiegel of The New York Post via Zoom and provided photos backing his claims to be who he said he was (a NFL blogger and tweeter from Israel). That didn’t exempt the account from criticism , but it did mean that the account holder seemed willing to discuss and defend the content there, including with this site and with A.J. Perez of Front Office Sports. That was a separation from many other aggregators, and there wasn’t much to suggest at that point that there was anything going on with the Kleiman account other than the stated story.

But things took a major twist this winter. Several sources spoke to AA at points and discussed the account holder there (again, presumably Kleiman, but even that’s less certain than it was) telling them about plans to sell their feed to someone else. Other people from the @GameDayNFL X/Twitter account accused Kleiman of improper use of their feed in January, and while Kleiman seemed to personally defend himself to inquiries about that, those defenses soon dried up around the next wave of identity questions in March.

And those questions really took off in May around a controversial (and since-deleted) @NFL_DovKleiman post spreading fake news that 69-year-old Las Vegas Raiders’ owner Mark Davis had impregnated 26-year-old model Hayden Hopkins. There, Barstool’s Jack McGuire wrote that he’d “confirmed” the account had been sold (but later deleted that tweet), the account declined comment to multiple outlets (including this one), and we took note of newly-launched TikTok and Instagram accounts featuring a man who does not seem to be the Kleiman who identified himself to Glasspiegel and others.

Around that time, Perez reported on Kleiman making a (past, not accepted) offer to sell his account for $75,000, receiving nearly $21,000 in a Bitcoin “tip” this spring, and got an email response from Kleiman of “Respectfully, I can’t comment on that Twitter account.” So there’s certainly some public material backing Kimes’ claims of “You’re a fake person who bought this account and mines it for click money.” And the Kleiman account did not respond to Kimes’ comment publicly, instead returning to posting various training camp videos.

The “DIE hire” (or diversity, equity, and inclusion hire) claim about Kimes is much more absurd, and she refutes that well herself. (How seriously anyone should take a particular claim from a person with 243 followers and a bio of “I am Jay Wali-Nazir Baba. I believe and love #maga #mma #Allah #kidrock in that order. if you disagree with me, than you must be a soy boy leftist pedo libtard” can be debated, but Kimes was addressing this more as a case of more of the general sexist and racist criticism she sees daily rather than for this person’s particular significance or lack thereof.) And the “The Bart, the” reference here is strong given the particular misspelling of “DEI” in the criticism:

At any rate, while it is significant to see Kimes lighting up critics this way (and understandable, considering the amount of unfair criticism she takes that disregards the knowledge she’s proven to have and how hard she’s worked to get to this point ), the more notable thing here is seeing her join the cast of “Kleiman” critics. That’s not a small group at this point, especially given the last few months’ news on the potential sale of that account, but it’s notable to see a blast there from one of ESPN’s most prominent NFL figures.

There won’t necessarily be a huge effect from this. The “Kleiman” account still has 287,000 followers despite the last few months, similar to what it had at the end of May. But the message of this account deserving even more skepticism than before with the lack of clarity on who runs it is spreading. And perhaps that will continue as we approach this NFL season.

[Mina Kimes on X/Twitter]

The post Mina Kimes blasts ‘fake person’ running @NFL_DovKleiman, responds to ‘ESPN’s DIE hire’ criticism appeared first on Awful Announcing .