Roslyn Hgts. shock jock defends Twitter tirade

Bill San Antonio

Shock jock radio personality Anthony Cumia said during an appearance on the Fox News program, “Red Eye,” on Friday that he will not apologize for a series of profane tweets that led to his firing as co-host of “The Opie and Anthony Show” by Sirius XM over the Fourth of July weekend.  

“I will never apologize for this. I will never apologize, even if they did come back and say, will you? I didn’t do anything wrong,” said Cumia, a Roslyn Heights resident. “This is exactly who I am. I’m not even going to deny it. I go on tears like this, I curse, I say horrific things about people that piss me off, and that’s exactly what I did. Why am I going to apologize and say I’m different or I’ve changed? I haven’t. It’d have been a phony or bogus apology, because if it happened again, I’d do the same thing.”

Cumia went on a lengthy, expletive-riddled Twitter rant on July 2 alleging he was taking photographs in Times Square when a black woman began punching him after appearing in some of his pictures, which he also tweeted.

In the series of since-deleted tweets, of which screenshots were published on the online news blog Gawker, Cumia referred to his alleged attacker in derogatory sexual terms and claimed, “she’s lucky I was a white legal gun owner or she’d be dead.”

Sirius XM announced its July 3 firing of Cumia through a statement saying his remarks “are abhorrent” and that “his behavior is wholly consistent with what Sirius XM represents.”

But Cumia said Friday that his comments were not racist and were consistent with his on-air persona.

“People who listened to me on the air would have known, yeah he talks like that on the show all the time,” he said. “For 10 years at Sirius XM, I had spoken like that, stringing together lines of obscenities in nonsensical fashion that somehow, you can’t interpret that well at 140 characters.”

He also said his alleged attacker, who has remained out of the public eye since the incident, “didn’t come off like a woman that would come off hip on the news or read social media or much of anything.”

“I think she either worked at the strip club that was right across from where she punched me or she’s a street walker, a hooker,” Cumia said. “She fit the profile for that.”

Cumia acknowledged criticism that he should have sought police assistance, but said, “I’ve known so many cops over the years, and if I’d have called one of them to say that a girl hit me, it doesn’t quite wash. I don’t think they care, first of all, I’m not going to use up the police resources in the pinnacle of the free world to say a girl hit me.”

“The Opie and Anthony” show continued on Monday with co-host Gregg “Opie” Hughes alongside comedian Jim Norton, but each said on the air that the show would not be the same without Cumia. In the wake of Cumia’s firing, Sirius XM also changed the name of “The Opie and Anthony Channel” to “Sirius XM Talk.”

“We have no choice, we have to be here, we’re under contract,” Hughes said.

Cumia, who made $3 million per year as co-host of “Opie and Anthony,” has announced he will return to the airwaves with “The Anthony Cumia Show,” a live daily program that will broadcast from his Horseshoe Lane home in Roslyn Heights starting on Aug. 4.

Cumia’s firing marked the third controversy that led to his or the program’s termination since “Opie and Anthony” first went on the air in 1995.

The duo were fired from a Boston-area radio station in 1998 after they conducted an April Fool’s prank that claimed then Boston Mayor Thomas Menino was killed in a car accident.

Then in 2002, the program was canceled by the now-defunct Infinity Broadcasting Corporation after a contest promoted through the show led to a couple calling in saying they were having sex in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

In the aftermath of the latest incident, a petition to reinstate Cumia on the grounds his First Amendment rights were violated in his termination circulated on the site Change.org. The petition pledges its signers would boycott Sirius XM until Cumia is reinstated.

WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE

 

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