Former New York Times journalist and current Newsweek senior writer Kurt Eichenwald, who has been described in the pages of this website as “a former Republican who regularly deals in histrionics, bombast, and questionable ethics,” got himself in a pickle on Twitter today when he tweeted something, got embarrassed by it, and went to extreme lengths to justify it while only inviting more derision.
What Eichenwald tweeted was pretty innocent: a photo with his computer screen in the background, which happened to have some hentai, or Japanese cartoon porn, open in a tab.
It wasn’t that Eichenwald had porn open on his computer. It was that he freaked out over the response and spent the next several hours trying to explain himself. The kerfuffle was enough that his name started trending on some parts of Twitter even though the highly-anticipated James Comey Senate hearing was streaming live at the same time.
“It all started when I got that fucking thing in the mail yesterday,” Eichenwald told The Outline, over the phone this afternoon.
Yesterday Eichenwald tweeted a picture of an anti-Semitic flyer he says arrived at his house that day. Someone photoshopped that picture to make it look like he was lying, Eichenwald told The Outline. So, to prove the flyer was real, he tweeted a picture of it in front of his computer screen, which showed which tabs were open in his browser. One of the tabs was labeled “B-Chiku [English, Uncensored, 212 pictures], with two pages…” B-Chiku is the name of the hentai Eichenwald was perusing.
Eichenwald says this is all just a big misunderstanding.
Yah, crappy photoshop Max. Unfortunately, no, this is what I got today. pic.twitter.com/jmi1U4wLUd
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) June 8, 2017
The Eichenwald family is, Kurt told The Outline, weird. “When my kids were growing up everyone said we were the fun family, and we have a lot of fun with each other,” he said.
Kurt says his family frequently has wide ranging conversations, and one of his “adult kids” was home from college. So: Kurt, his college-age son, and Kurt’s wife all got into a conversation about the concept of Rule 34. That concept is: if it exists, there is porn of it. That conversation, Eichenwald says, then veered into the topic of tentacle porn, which is, as you might have guessed, porn that involves a combination of tentacles and sexual activity.
Eichenwald says his wife didn’t believe tentacle porn was a real thing, so he looked it up on his computer, and he says that explains why there was a hentai tab open on his screen when he tweeted that picture. (B-Chiku, as far as we can tell, is not tentacle porn.) Eichenwald even tweeted a text screenshot with his wife to prove that his story was legit:
No one hacked my account. We were searching to prove to my wife tentacle porn exists. See text convo. I only removed names and drug names. pic.twitter.com/EMHYlYKcPf
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) June 8, 2017
“I mean, let's be honest, it's fucking weird,” Eichenwald told The Outline. “I mean, cartoon porn, you know? It's beyond weird. But it's sort of like, what is that thing... which again, I’ve never looked it up but 'three cups and a bowl’ or something?” The Outline confirmed Eichenwald was referring to popular porn video “2 Girls 1 Cup,” in which women defecate into a cup. Eichenwald said he did not know what “2 Girls 1 Cup” is about and refused multiple times to have the video described to him.
“I don't know exactly what it is and when people started talking about it, all I know is that people puke when they start talking about it so I don't want to know what it is.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of the porn that Eichenwald was looking at. It is B-Chiku, not 8-Chiku.
