Twelve hours before he was set to appear on cable television to explain a weekend Twitter rant many have called racist, Robert Zimmermann Jr. tweeted an apology.
“I’m sincerely sorry my tweet offended many – I made a serious error in judgment abt the way it wld convey & understand why it is offensive,” Zimmerman tweeted from his @rzimmermanjr account, adding in separate tweets: “I have a point2 make abt accuracy of media portrayals but Twitter isn’t the place2 do it effectively – comes across as insensitive at best” … and this:
With that, the elder brother of George Zimmerman, charged with second degree murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, was ready to go on air Wednesday night, where he tried to explain why he compared Martin to the teen charged with fatally shooting 13-month-old Antonio Santiago while attempting to rob the child’s mother in Brunswick, Georgia.
The tweet that ignited controversy
The composite photo Robert Zimmerman tweeted on Sunday, showed 17-year-old Brunswick murder suspect De’Marquise Elkins side-by-side with a picture of Martin, who was 17 at the time of his death, which Zimmerman claims is from the teen’s Facebook page. Both teens are posed with middle fingers extended. The caption under the photo read: “A picture speaks a thousand words. Any questions?” and the tweet, which was directed at the accounts of the NAACP, Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large of the right wing website Breitbart.com, the NRA and others, read: “Alleged FBpics of 13mo. old Antonio Santiago’s alleged killer & #TrayvonMartin #uncanny.”
The tweet drew a swift Twitter response from a handful of supporters and a flood of condemnation. In defending himself, Robert Zimmerman Jr. elaborated, responding to one tweeter who called his post “sick” by saying: “‘Sick’ is canonizing a person who is ‘unarmed’ & therefore ‘innocent’ while ‘convicting’ another b/c they are reportedly ‘white,'” apparently referring to Martin, who was unarmed at the time George Zimmerman shot him last February — and to his brother’s race (the Zimmermans’ father is white and their mother is Peruvian.)
Zimmerman’s back and forth with other tweeters, which continued for hours, pressing the comparison between Martin and Elkins (one tweet read “Teen to West: “Do you want me to shoot your baby?” #TrayvonMartin to #GeorgeZimmerman : You’re gonna die tonight Motherf***er”) and accusing the “liberal media” of “suppressing” the Trayvon image, which he said represents the “real” person his brother encountered on the night of the fatal shooting, but which the media refuses to portray.
At one point, the 32-year-old tweeted to activist Michael Skolnik, who has been a vocal advocate for Martin’s parents, a complaint about media “avoid[ing] mentioning the race of suspects of horrific attrocities when they are black, and then adding: “Lib media shld ask if what these2 black teens did 2 a woman&baby is the reason ppl think blacks mightB risky.”
He also responded to a group of apparent supporters of his brother that the media “canonizes” blacks by “referring to them as victims”:
Next: Zimmerman calls tweets a ‘mistake,’ stands by media critique
During the interview with Morgan, Zimmerman repeated his apology for the Twitter comments, saying, “I don’t think Twitter is the place to make points about what you recall a year ago. Because the recollections that I have or that we have as a family specifically are very different than what can be portrayed in 140 characters.”
He added: “Now I realized those were controversial and offensive, and I did publicly apologize for them. I don’t think it was the right thing to do that way.” But he continued to insist that the real issue was the media’s refusal to portray Martin in the same, glaring light Elkins, or his brother, have been.
“The point about the pictures. It was a larger point on the media and their honesty in portraying the person who encountered my brother February 26th. We’ve been led to believe that it’s a junior high school aged person because of the pictures, the way he’s portrayed.”
“Well, he was 17,” an incredulous Morgan retorted.
Much of Morgan’s questioning focused on the tweet indicating that the shocking alleged crime two teens are accused of committing in Georgia, “is the reason blacks are considered ‘risky.'”
Morgan said of the teens charged in the Georgia case: “the reason why I want to take you back to that is that when you say — what these two black teens did to a woman and her baby, they shot the baby in the head is the allegation they have been charged with. … A more gruesome crime would be hard to imagine.”
“You are likening this to Trayvon Martin who was unarmed.”
“What I’m saying is, yes, he was 17. And he chose to portray himself by his own hand in a certain way,” Zimmerman said of Martin, after reiterating his apology.
“What I’m saying is, both of these people were 17 years old. And before Trayvon Martin was a household name and before De’Marquis from Georgia was a household name, they had an identity that they portrayed. And I’m not saying that because you flick off a camera that says anything about you other than that is the way you choose to portray yourself.”
Citing what he called additional pictures of Martin obtained by the conservative website The Daily Caller that he says make the picture he composited and posted, “the tip of the iceberg,” Zimmerman complained that “we got to know a better picture of who Trayvon Martin was” through the social media images of the slain teen. But he said “those pics were surrounded in some kindof cloak of secrecy and they’re not portrayed in the media.” Meanwhile, he complained that George Zimmerman “is portrayed as a murderer in the liberal media.”
Natalie Jackson, who is part of the legal team representing Martin’s family, and who Zimmerman criticized during the interview, along with lead attorney Ben Crump and the family’s public relations representative, Ryan Julisaon, said it’s ironic that Zimmerman is seeking the benefit of the doubt for his social media communications, but not granting the same to the slain Miami teen.
“You, as a 30-year-old [sic] want to say that you made a mistake on your Twitter account, but you want a 17-year-old teenager who was the victim of a crime to have his alleged social media portrayed in the most negative light,” she said after watching the CNN interview.
Next: Seeking distance from Robert Zimmerman
Mark O’Mara, who represents George Zimmerman in the case that’s expected to go to trial in June, on Wednesday, began making the media rounds this week, commenting in several stories, seeking to separate the defense from Robert Zimmerman and his Twitter comments.
“First of all it doesn’t represent George or the defense,” O’Mara told theGrio by telephone. “And I keep my distance from him because I don’t want to be connected.”
And while O’Mara said he would prefer that no one in the case beside him talk to the media about the case, Robert Zimmerman has only increased his media profile, include previous stints on Morgan’s show, and a recent appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.” O’Mara stressed that the incendiary comments on Twitter over the weekend are not helpful to the defense — something Robert Zimmerman acknowledged to Morgan.
“We’ve tried to identify that this case should not be a race-related event because nothing about it was racial,” O’Mara said. “The idea that comparing somebody who shot a kid in the face with Trayvon, who passed away, because they’re both black and both have fingers just seems really insensitive.”
O’Mara said he would “like to think [Robert Zimmerman’s] heart was in the right place, that he was trying to get a point across” defending his brother, but that “you should not do it in that way, particularly because the racial focus on this case is so intense.”
The attorney added that he has had little direct contact with Robert, exchanging texts with him “two or three times” in the past month. And he said he has kept the contacts intentionally minimal.
“I’m the spokesperson” for George Zimmerman, O’Mara said. “I don’t want George talking, I don’t want my staff running out there talking because I want to know that if anything is said wrong, I’m the one saying it. If Robert is starting to be vocal he can do it on behalf of the family, but not on the part of the defense.”
O’Mara’s spokesman said later that to the attorney’s knowledge, George Zimmerman is not in contact with his brother.
In challenging Robert Zimmerman Jr., Morgan suggested that his tweets could “reveal a possible mindset amongst the Zimmerman family that young black teenagers are risky because they are young black teenagers, which many people say is the reason George Zimmerman profiled Trayvon Martin.” Zimmerman is claiming self-defense in the case, and denies he profiled Martin.
Zimmerman countered that beyond their race, Elkins and Martin are analogous as teenagers — “one who committed a crime and one who would have gotten away with a crime” had George Zimmerman not acted. And he blamed the “risky narrative” on people who have coined the phrase “we are all Trayvon Martin,” saying it is they, and the “liberal media,” and not him, who promote that claim. Elkins has been indicted on seven counts including “malice murder” by a Georgia grand jury, while a second suspect, a 15-year-old, was indicted on seven counts including murder, in the killing of Antonio Santiago and the attempted robbery of the child’s mother.
“The liberal media and MSNBC are not walking up and down the street [in Brunswick, Georgia] asking people if they’re going to walk their babies” in the light of the Santiago killing, he said. (TheGrio and MSNBC are divisions of NBC Universal. George Zimmerman has sued NBCUniversal for defamation and the company has strongly denied his allegations.)
Next: ‘These statements won’t come in …’
While Jackson said Robert Zimmerman’s comments and sentiments are not evidence in the case, his racially-tinged statements are reminiscent of statements by another Zimmerman family member, known publicly as Witness 9; a cousin of Zimmerman’s who alleged in statements to Sanford, Florida police that Zimmerman and members of his family harbor negative views about African-Americans.
Robert Zimmerman’s tweets “back up Witness 9’s statements,” Jackson said. “This is not about whether Robert Zimmerman is a racist or about what he said, and I really don’t care whether Robert Zimmerman is a racist or what he said. All we care about is the evidence that will prove that George Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin and killed him.”
In a phone call that Witness 9 placed to police two days after the shooting last year, Witness 9 said of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin: “I don’t know what happened, I don’t know at all who this kid was, or anything else but I know George. And I know that he does not like black people and he would start something. He’s a very confrontational person.” She added: “it’s in his blood. We’ll just say that, and I don’t want this, this poor kid and their family to just be overlooked.”
“I don’t talk to him because of the the things that he says … the person he is … the things that he does,” she added. “I know his mother, I know everybody and they’re all the same way, and I hate that. They’re just mean and [they’re] open about it.”
In a later interview with prosecutors, Witness 9 said she made the phone call because she was “afraid that he may have done something because the kid was black,” adding that when the two of them were growing up, Zimmerman “and his family have always made statements that they don’t like black people if they don’t act like white people. They like black people if they act white, and other than that they talk a lot of … a lot of bad things about black people.” Asked to whom she was referring, the woman answered George Zimmerman, “his brother, his sister, his mom, his dad.” Witness 9 told prosecutors she couldn’t recall George Zimmerman ever taking specific action that she could determine was because of race.
Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Kendall Coffey thinks it’s highly unlikely that Robert Zimmerman’s statements would make it into George Zimmerman’s trial. But he said the Twitter rant could harm the younger Zimmerman’s case “in the court of public opinion.
Regarding Robert Zimmerman, Coffey called it “baffling that he’s operating as this unguided missile, because it can only be harmful to Zimmerman. Maybe the family isn’t close enough for them to say ‘stay home, shut up.’ But you’d think with the consequences his brother’s facing he’d have some concern.”
Coffey said Zimmerman’s defense had been gaining some traction with evidence released of Zimmerman’s injuries on the night of the shooting, and that Robert Zimmerman’s statements could set the defense back with the public.
“Because [while] judges will do everything they can to reduce pretrial publicity, but if it’s out there that Robert Zimmerman is out there making racist comments, that certainly is going to raise the cloud in some people about what kinds of attitudes were inside the Zimmerman home. It’s certainly the last thing the Zimmerman defense needs,” he said.
Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @TheReidReport.