'Bean Dad' Says He's Very Sorry

Musician says tale of hungry daughter and can of beans was exaggerated
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 5, 2021 3:33 PM CST
'Bean Dad' Says He's Very Sorry
Roderick said a "teaching moment just dropped into my lap" when his daughter came to him with a can opener and a can of beans.   (Getty Images/craigratcliffe)

"Bean Dad" John Roderick is sorry about the can of worms he opened up with an anecdote about refusing to open a can of beans for his hungry 9-year-old daughter. The podcaster and musician says in an apology on his website that the story, in which he claimed she spent six hours struggling to open the can, was "exaggerated" and told in the style of his "pedantic dad" comedic persona, the BBC reports. "I didn't share how much laughing we were doing, how we had a bowl of pistachios between us all day as we worked on the problem, or that we'd both had a full breakfast together a few hours before," says Roderick, who deleted his Twitter account after his posts caused an uproar and allegations of child abuse. He says he has a lot of "reflecting" to do and will "take a hiatus from public life."

Roderick says he was "ignorant" and "insensitive" not to realize that the language he used "reminded people very viscerally of abuse they'd experienced at the hand of a parent." "I am deeply sorry for having precipitated more hurt in the world, for having prolonged or exacerbated it by fighting back and being flippant when confronted, and for taking my Twitter feed offline yesterday instead of facing the music," he writes. Variety reports that Roderick took a similar line in apologizing for years-old tweets using racist and homophobic language that surfaced amid the "Bean Dad" controversy. "All of those tweets were intended to be ironic, sarcastic," he writes. "I thought then that being an ally meant taking the slurs of the oppressors and flipping them to mock racism, sexism, homophobia, and bigotry." (More Twitter stories.)

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