Last week, David Hogg's mother quipped that ousted TV and radio host Jamie Allman was a "smart man" for choosing to resign after his tweet concerning her son — the now infamous "I've been hanging out and getting ready to ram a hot poker up David Hogg's ass" — triggered boycotts and national outrage.
But she may have given Allman more credit than he deserved.
Last night, in his first public comments since being taken off the air, Allman uploaded a video to Facebook to dispute claims that he had "parted ways" with 97.1 FM station owner Entercom Communications.
"It's time to expose some truths and some lies," Allman said after a quick introduction. "[It's] time to expose people and companies who thought truth is for sale and that we would all go quietly away like a bunch of surrender monkeys to the radical mob."
We'll give Allman credit for a solid Simpsons reference. Anyway, as he continued, the talk show host explained that though he'd been in talks with Entercom over the conditions of his exit, he never actually signed papers making it official.
That's because last Tuesday— one day after Allman was officially kicked off KDNL (ABC 30) — the radio host attended his nephew's confirmation, a fact that he found necessary to repeat in the video no less than four times.
In Allman's telling, at the time Entercom's HR representative was pressing him to make a decision on how the company should phrase their announcement of his exit. Did he want the company to say he had "resigned," or that they had "parted ways"?
"I'm like, 'I don't want to say anything right now,'" he explained in the video. "'I don't have time to deal with this, I have to get to my nephew's confirmation.'"
Allman continued, "So there I am at my nephew's confirmation. The confirmation goes on, it's beautiful, I loved it. I go to my car after the confirmation, and my phone is loaded with texts."
That, says Allman, is how he found out that an Entercom spokesman had released a statement to the media, stating, "KFTK has parted ways with Mr. Allman and that his show is canceled effective immediately."
Allman now claims he never signed the company's paperwork to make that parting of ways official. More than that, he adds that the company is threatening to rip up the deal if he doesn't delete unspecified posts from his personal Facebook page. (The deal, he also explained, came with a "pretty heavy duty disparagement clause," and while Allman didn't specify which posts they wanted deleted, he did at one point post on Facebook that he had not resigned.)
"Now," he said in the video, "after refusing to sign an agreement to repeat their lies in return for money, they have taken their noble offer off the table and told me that if I do not take the truth down off of my Facebook page, they're going to fire me for cause."
Allman then bragged that his attorney is "all over this" and spent a few minutes slamming "deceptive media companies" and "crazy political mobs."
Addressing his supporters, he concluded, "So far, the corporate cowards and conspirators have been able to control the message. It's been frustrating, I know. But those days are over. Stay tuned, stay strong. Operation Hot Poker is under way."
David Hogg's mother may be proven wrong: Allman might not be a smart man. But there's no denying he's a showman.
Follow Danny Wicentowski on Twitter at @D_Towski. E-mail the author at [email protected]
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