Cam Newton, quarterback for the Carolina Panthers issued a public apology on Thursday, Oct. 5, for his word choice in response to a female reporter’s question.
Newton posted a 108-second video apology on his Twitter and Facebook just a day after Charlette Observer reporter, Jourdan Rodrigue asked about wide receiver Devin Funchess’s pass routes on Wednesday. Newton responded by laughing and saying, “It’s funny to hear a female talk about routes.”
At the time Rodrigue confronted Newton after the news conference, but he did not apologize to her, she said in a statement Wednesday.
The video posted at 5:58 p.m. on Twitter, comes around nine hours after a Dannon Oikos Yoghurt representative said the company would no longer use Newton in its commercials and advertisements and would begin pulling those immediately, ESPN reported.
It also comes not long after Carolina coach Ron Rivera said Newton “made a mistake” in his conduct, ESPN reported.
In the apology, Newton had tears in his eyes and said his word choice during the press conference was “extremely degrading and disrespectful to women.”
But the 2015 NFL MVP, said that it was not his intention.
“After careful thought, I understand that my word choice was extremely degrading and disrespectful to women,” he said. “And to be honest, that was not my intention. If you are a person who took offense to what I said, I sincerely apologize to you.
“I’m a man who tries to be a positive role model to my community and tries to use my platform to inspire others. I take ownership to everything that comes with that. What I did was extremely unacceptable” he said.
Newton never addressed Rodrigue by name in the video apology.
— Cameron Newton (@CameronNewton) October 6, 2017
The quarterback then made reference to his two daughters and said that he learned a “valuable lesson” over the incident.
“At their age, I try to instill in them that they can do and be anything that they want to be,” he said. “The fact that during this process I’ve already lost sponsors and countless fans, I realized that the joke is really on me. And I’ve learned a valuable lesson from this. To the young people who see this, I hope that you learn something from this as well. Don’t be like me; be better than me.”
“To the reporters, to the journalists, to the moms—super moms—to the daughters, the sisters, and the women all around the world, I sincerely apologize and hope that you can find the kindness of your heart to forgive me. Thank you,” Newton went on to say.
The video apology was seen by many on Twitter, as over 56,000 users favorited the post and over 19,000 retweeted it, as of writing on Friday, Oct. 6.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, Rodrigue also tweeted an apology for what she called “offensive tweets” posted on her account four to five years ago.
Her paper the Observer stated that the tweets were from 2012 and 2013 when Rodrigue was in college. In the tweets, she made light of others racist remarks and retweeted a racial phrase.
— Jourdan Rodrigue (@JourdanRodrigue) October 5, 2017