Meyers Leonard, a reserve center for the Miami Heat, will be “away from the team indefinitely,” the team said Tuesday night, after using an anti-Semitic slur while he played a video game on a public live broadcast.
“Miami HEAT strongly condemns the use of any form of hate speech,” the team said in a statement. “The words used by Meyers Leonard were wrong and we will not tolerate hateful language from anyone associated with our franchise. Hearing this from a Miami Heat player is especially disappointing and painful for everyone who works here, as well as for the larger South Florida, Miami Heat and NBA communities. “
Leonard, 29, was playing “Call Of Duty: Warzone”, a popular multiplayer video game, on Twitch, a live streaming platform inhabited mainly by players.
Leonard said slander, followed by sexist vulgarity, after calling another player a “coward” for the way they tried to kill his character in the game. The video was recorded on Monday, but did not receive much attention until Tuesday, after Leonard’s slander clip was posted on social media. In the afternoon, it was the most popular topic on Twitter in the United States.
While Leonard’s video saying that slander was circulating, Leonard was broadcasting a live session other than “Call of Duty: Warzone”, an event he promoted on Tuesday on his Twitter account, which has more than 177,000 followers . The live chat on that stream started to fill with comments about the slander, and Leonard hurriedly ended his participation after receiving a phone call.
“My wife needs me. She just called. I have to roll, brother, ” Leonard said when he left.
The Twitter post announcing his live broadcast was soon deleted, as were dozens of previous videos of him playing on Twitch. Leonard’s words were soon condemned by the Anti-Defamation League, which wrote in a statement who was “shocked and disappointed to see @MeyersLeonard use this ugly and offensive #antisemite slander. We contacted @MiamiHEAT and @NBA about this and urged Mr. Leonard to immediately issue an apology for this blatant and hateful rhetoric. “
Leonard apologized Tuesday night in a statement posted on Instagram, writing that he “deeply regretted using an anti-Semitic slander during a live broadcast yesterday.” He claimed not to know what the word he used meant, but said that his “ignorance about his history and how offensive it is to the Jewish community is not an excuse at all and I was just wrong.”
It is not yet known what NBA discipline Leonard will face NBA spokesman Mike Bass said in an afternoon statement: “We just heard about the video and are in the process of collecting more information. The NBA unequivocally condemns all forms of hate speech. The Heat said it would cooperate with the NBA investigation.
Leonard is a big fan of video games. In 2019, he invested in the FaZe Clan, a popular e-sports team, writing this he was “excited to be part of the industry’s leading organization and continue to build my brand in the world of electronic games / sports”.
But that mark was unquestionably tarnished on Tuesday. Leonard’s channel has been suspended by Twitch – “We don’t allow the use of hateful slander on Twitch,” the company said in a statement – and several gaming companies affiliated with Leonard have reported it.
In a statement posted on Twitter, FaZe Clan said he was “incredibly disappointed to hear Meyers’ broadcast today” and that “although Meyers is not a member of FaZe, we are severing ties with him”. A FaZe Clan spokeswoman did not respond to an email asking what it meant to sever ties with Leonard and whether FaZe Clan was returning his investment.
Three gaming companies that sponsored Leonard, and had their logos visible in the stream where he used the insult, severed ties with him.
Origin PC and Scuf Gaming, both owned by the hardware company Corsair, released identical statements on Tuesday, saying they “decided to end our working relationship with Meyers”. Astro Gaming, whose gaming headphones Leonard was distributing as a promotion on his Twitch channel, said she was ending her relationship with him “with immediate effect”.
Leonard, a Portland Trail Blazers pick in the first round of 2012, is in his ninth NBA season, but has appeared in just three games in this campaign. He is expected to miss the rest of the season after a shoulder operation last month. Last season, Leonard started with 49 games for the Heat, averaging 6.1 points and 5.1 rebounds per game as the team reached the final.
He also received attention last summer for being one of the few NBA players who refused to kneel while playing the national anthem, in protest against racial injustice, when the league resumed the 2019-20 season at Walt Disney World. Leonard, who is white, said he supported the Black Lives Matter movement and did not see the kneeling act as disrespectful, but that he also wanted to honor his brother, who served in the army.
Leonard is receiving about $ 9.4 million this season. Heat has the option of extending its contract to the next season.
Online video game streaming – and its rapidly expanding audience – has turned gamers into celebrities, but it has also become a place of controversy. The audio and text chat functions in many video games are notorious for frequent pronouncements of slander and a culture in which players will say anything to get a reaction. In 2017, Felix Kjellberg, a popular video game known as PewDiePie that currently has more than 109 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, was dismissed by many traditional sponsors, such as Disney, after it was reported that he had used anti-Semitic slanders in at least nine videos.
Later that year, after using a different slander during the live broadcast of a game, the phrase “heated game moment” entered the vocabulary as an excuse to use derogatory language during the live broadcast of video games.
Celebrities, especially athletes like Devin Booker, owner of the Phoenix Suns, and Blake Snell, launcher of the San Diego Padres, were attracted to live-streaming video games. But some also had problems for what they said. Last spring, Kyle Larson, a popular NASCAR driver, was fired from his team and suspended by the organization after using a racial slur during a live broadcast of a virtual race.
Marc Stein contributed reports.