The Miami Heat suspended Meyers Leonard indefinitely after he used an anti-Semitic slander during a Twitch broadcast on Monday.
“The Miami Heat strongly condemns the use of any form of hate speech,” wrote the NBA team in a Twitter statement Tuesday night. “The words used by Meyers Leonard were wrong and we will not tolerate hateful language from anyone associated with our franchise.”
In a statement apologizing for his actions posted on Instagram, Leonard says he did not know the meaning of the slander when he said it.
“Although I didn’t know what the word meant at the time, my ignorance about its history and how offensive it is to the Jewish community is not an excuse at all and I was just wrong,” he said. “Now I am more aware of its meaning and I am committed to properly seeking out people who can help educate me about this type of hatred and how we can fight it.”
The NBA also issued a statement, saying it “unequivocally condemns all forms of hate speech,” a spokesman told ESPN.
Twitch suspended Leonard, the company said The Verge. “We do not allow the use of hateful slander on Twitch,” Twitch said in a statement. “The safety of our community is our highest priority and, according to our guidelines, we reserve the right to suspend any account for conduct that we consider inappropriate, harmful or puts our community at risk.”
Other organizations have also distanced themselves from Leonard. The electronic games and sports organization FaZe Clan, in which Leonard had invested, said Tuesday night that it had broken ties:
And sponsors Origin PC and Scuf Gaming, both owned by Corsair, also said that we are Final his working relationships with Leonard.
While stars saying inappropriate things in the stream are relatively new territory for NBA players who are interested in streaming, unfortunately it is a common problem for the biggest names in Twitch. Turner “Tfue” Tenney, for example, was suspended in 2018 for using a racial slur on the broadcast, although the platform did not take action when he said a different insult in 2019. And Fifteen days professional Daniel “Dubs” Walsh was banned from Twitch and suspended from the FaZe Clan after saying racial slander in February 2020. (He has since been reinstated).
Other celebrities who tried to stream also faced real-world consequences due to the offensive language. NASCAR driver Kyle Larson was fired by his team in April for using the n-word during a race simulation stream, while musician Joel Zimmerman, who you know as deadmau5, deleted his Twitch channel in 2019 after being suspended for saying homophobic slanders.