Trail Blazers Fire New Broadcaster After Misogynistic, Racist Comments Surface

The Portland Trail Blazers fired Braiden Bell on Thursday night, hours after he was named the team’s new television play-by-play broadcaster, after misogynistic and racist comments surfaced that Bell made on Twitter when he was a teenager.

The tweets were from 2012 and 2013 and were first spotted by KGW reporter Devon Haskins. KGW was in the process of reporting a story on the tweets Thursday afternoon and reached out to the Blazers for comment. The team replied several hours later saying they had fired Bell.

The posts in question had not been deleted as of Thursday evening and were from the Twitter account that Bell, a prolific tweeter of more than a decade, still actively uses for sports commentary.

“I’m not racist at all.. But not gonna lie.. Asian people piss me off! Hahaha #Honest,” Bell wrote in a Dec. 9, 2012 tweet.

“Gotta give a shoutout to all the big girls out there and those closet w–res,” Bell wrote on Nov. 30, 2012.

“We got a sl-t alert on aisle 10,” he wrote on Feb. 13, 2013.

“Girls these nights… Smh. #ThirstyForTheD,” he wrote on Feb. 24, 2013.

KGW viewed other tweets from Bell containing language that appeared misogynistic or racist from this time period, but in some cases the context could not be verified due other users’ accounts or linked content being inactive.

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KGW’s review did not locate any offensive tweets from Bell after he became an adult. In fact, by the latter half of 2015, Bell’s public tweets were almost entirely about sports.

KGW reached out to Bell’s agent before he was fired. His agent referred questions to the team.

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