James Gunn did not make 10,000 jokes about rape and pedophilia. Between 2008 and 2012, he made fewer than 20. I did the math.

(Reposted from the James Gunn discussion thread with permission from u/Flamma_Man.)

So in the interests of science, I read every old James Gunn tweet that Mike Cernovich and his hit squad retweeted last week. This is based on Cernovich's Twitter timeline from July 19-20 because he posted most of the screencaps of the tweets and retweeted a lot of other people's screencaps, so it's possible I missed a few that were retweeted elsewhere but fell through the cracks during the heat of the scandal. This covers all of main tweets that you see people referencing individually and that made it into the compilation image that keeps floating around.

Like in my post describing why I think James Gunn likely had a pretty understandable reason for not deleting the tweets sooner, I want to make it clear that I am not defending the content of what he said, except in cases where it's being willfully misinterpreted to push Cernovich's agenda. I just think it's important to be honest about the scope, content, context, and intent of Gunn's tweets and make our judgments based on the facts of the case and not what we saw on Twitter or Reddit or a Breitbart article. For instance, it's not true that Gunn deleted 10,000 tweets about pedophilia.

In fact, the total number of incriminating or offensive tweets that Mike Cernovich and his goons unearthed between 8:49 p.m. on July 19 and 3:04 a.m. on July 20 (plus however long they'd already been digging prior to announcing their intentions) was 38.

That's including not just pedophilia and rape jokes but every offensive and objectionable joke they could find, and also a few that were actually completely innocuous but they retweeted anyway for some reason. These tweets span from June 2008 to December 2014 (well actually December 2012 because there's nothing incriminating about the 2014 tweet, they just pretended there was). I've compiled them here in chronological order, unedited except to censor two unfortunate slurs. I've also included my own commentary to lend context or elaboration where it seemed appropriate. Needless to say, trigger warning for rape and pedophilia.

10 Jun 2008

Laughter is the best medicine. That's why I laugh at people with AIDS.

Edgy AIDS joke. Despite the punchline literally being laughing at people with AIDS, it's actually slightly more clever than that, as the joke is that laughing at AIDS patients acts as medicine for them.

11 Jun 2008

One of the fattest dudes I've ever seen is walking down the street towards me. Over 500 easy. More to love!

Kind of mean-spirited fat joke. I'm all for teaching James Gunn to be woke on matters of fatphobia and body-shaming, but no one seems to care about this one.

30 Jun 2008

I burnt my tongue on an enchilada. Fucking Mexicans!

It's a stretch to even call this a Mexican joke. It's like a parody of a racist joke about Mexicans.

30 Jul 2008

In the park with Von Spears. Von Spears loves kids so much I think he may be a pedophile.

Wesley Von Spears is James Gunn's pet dog. Do I really need to elaborate more on why this isn't the offensive pedophilia joke it's been painted as?

27 Aug 2008

Just made a joke about ass-raping my friend when she was asleep.

I mean, I personally wouldn't publicly make this joke on Twitter for everyone to see forever, but he's joking around with a friend of his. Be offended if you want, I guess.

26 Oct 2008

Oh, I forgot to tell you guys - last night I did a reading with a convicted pedophile.

As for the pedophile, it was JEEPERS CREEPERS director Victor Salva (convicted of performing oral sex on a 12 year old boy).

This was actually multiple tweets but they were made on the same day about the same subject so I counted them as one. Based on how this reads it looks like there's at least one additional tweet missing from between these two but these are the only ones Cernovich took a screenshot of.

Anyway, James Gunn attended and took part in a book reading for the non-fiction anthology The Book of Lists: Horror. You can see a clip of his reading here. Victor Salva, a convicted sex offender who served time in prison for having sex with and making pornography of a minor (and was subsequently hired by Disney to direct their 1995 film Powder, fun fact!), was also at the reading and Gunn saw him there.

That's it.

26 Nov 2008

New poll. 9-11 jokes. Always in poor taste, or sometimes funny? Additional question: More or less offensive than Holocaust jokes?

A two-fer: edgy 9/11 joke and edgy Holocaust joke. Not really all that edgy though because there isn't actually a joke about either one.

5 Dec 2008

Or in case they kept in the stuff about the time my friend @johncabrera killed a whore in Mexico.

Oh my god, I can't believe James Gunn just publicly confessed on Twitter to witnessing an unreported murder. Either that or it was a joke.

17 Dec 2008

Leading in Votes on which American Idol Contestant I should Rape: Sanjaya with 12 votes, followed by Constantine with 3

Unfunny rape joke, but at least it's about raping men. Let's give credit where credit is due. [Edit 1: Follow-up comment.]

13 Jan 2009? (screencap too small to read date accurately)

Trying to figure out the most disgusting feature of Vegas: these [slur for transgender]-riffic Rita Rudner billboards or all the Ed Hardy clothing.

This is one of two tweets that I actually did find legitimately offensive, although in Gunn's defense the transgender rights movement was practically unknown at the time and even today it's quite common for people not to realize that that word is seen as an offensive slur.

4 Feb 2009

This may be the plant version of adopting a damaged 12 year old girl who steals your money and accuses you of molesting her.

I'm not sure what "this" is referring to. I assume there was some context that got lost when this tweet was cherry-picked from the depths of Twitter Hell. I guess that you could technically consider this a pedophilia tweet if you squint at it but without knowing what it was in reference to I can't even tell what this was supposed to mean.

22 Feb 2009

The best thing about being raped is when you're done being raped it's like, "Whew, this feels great, not being raped!"

Lazy, unfunny rape joke. If you're opposed to rape jokes on principle there isn't much of a defense for this, although I think it bears noting that it's a rape joke due to being a joke about rape and doesn't actually feature a specific person being raped.

1 Mar 2009

Mary Matthews just told me a story about how a monkey jerked off to completion on a kid on the set of Max Keeble's Big Move.

Gunn went into more detail on this story on his (now deleted) blog, but this tweet gives the gist of it. Gunn was at a party and a friend of his told him a story about the time she was working on the set of a movie and a trained monkey they were using in the film suddenly started jerking off and blew its load on one of the kid actors, who were in the 12-15 age range. Gunn thought this story was hilarious.

To be completely honest, personally I'm unfazed by most of these tweets, but I have to admit that the language Gunn uses in retelling the story is pretty gross. I can see how it would give someone pause, especially since the person getting monkey ejaculate on them was a kid. This was a pretty gross thing that he shouldn't have said.

If we leave out the fact that it was a kid, however, you have to admit that a monkey randomly ejaculating on some unsuspecting schlub is pretty funny.

19 Mar 2009

I thought it was a pedophile game.

No context for this screenshot, no idea what it's in reference to. It doesn't really seem possible to me to make any kind of legitimate value judgment on this.

4 Apr 2009

RT @blackehart "I remember my first NAMBLA meeting. It was the first time I felt ok being who I am. Some of those guys are still my BFF's."

Okay, this is an important one, because it's one of the most misrepresented and misinterpreted of the many controversial Gunn tweets that resurfaced. On the old version of Twitter, the one that existed at the time Gunn was making these tweets, when you retweeted something someone else had said, it would just appear as text preceded by "RT @[person's Twitter handle]." Here is an off-site Twitter help guide from 2008 that shows how you can just add whatever you want to what someone said when you retweet them. You could make it look like the person you were quoting had said whatever you wanted. In fact this wasn't at all uncommon, people did it all the time.

@blackehart is Stephen Blackehart, an actor friend of Gunn's who has appeared in several of Gunn's films, including GotG 1 and 2. Gunn is playing a joke on his friend by making it look like Blackehart is admitting to being in NAMBLA. Maybe that's in bad taste, but it's not a sign of anything more sinister than two dudes who made trashy shock movies together busting each other's balls. Stephen Blackehart's current pinned tweet on Twitter is a defense of James Gunn.

Lloyd Kaufman made a similar joke directed toward Gunn. This is how they goof around with one another. They're a pack of bros bro-ing it up.

5 Apr 2009

RT @peteralton I like it when little boys touch me in my silly place. Shhh!

This is one of the big ones that I've seen referenced most often, even though those references conveniently omit the key context that I explained above. Peter Alton is another friend of Gunn's, and Gunn is fucking around with him by pretending that Alton is admitting to being a pedophile. If you're against pedophilia being used as a subject for humor by anyone under any circumstances ever, there's nothing I can say to make you think this is acceptable, but it's basically the equivalent of taking your buddy's phone and using his Facebook account to post "I HUNGER FOR DONG."

22 Apr 2009

@DrewAtHitFix Honesty's the best policy. Tell your 3 year old you're laughing thinking of me fucking 3PO. He'll appreciate it when older.

@DrewAtHitFix was, at the time, Drew McWeeny, aka AICN reviewer Moriarty. Again, there's no context for this tweet, because Mike Cernovich thoughtlessly omitted the tweet from McWeeny that Gunn was responding to. Even without it, however, it's blatantly dishonest to lump this in with the pedo jokes. There's sexual activity, and there's a kid, but the kid isn't involved in or even present for the activity. The only one getting fucked is poor C-3PO.

McWeeny also defended Gunn on his current account.

4 Aug 2009

For the record, I'm against rape AND baby eating in real life (unless you're really, really, really hungry.)

This is a joke that has the word rape in it, but it's not a rape joke, it's a joke about eating babies. I guess that would make it a dead baby joke, the Edgiest of Edgy Schoolyard Humor. Who cares.

28 Sep 2009

Just got done looking at some videos that were too disgusting and too disturbing to even share. Even I have my limits. Time to throw up!

There is nothing wrong or offensive about this tweet, Cernovich only retweeted it to suggest that Gunn must have been watching child porn or snuff films or something because he is The Most Evil Man Who Ever Lived.

9 Oct 2009

Guys - I was being serious, not a joke - It's the Sabbath and Jews aren't allowed to open the oven on the Sabbath. So I did them a favor.

I see Jews, I see an oven.... Is this a Holocaust joke? I'm honestly not sure. If it is, it's so badly worded I'm more confused than I am offended.

22 Oct 2009

Wondering which Disneyland character would be the worst to get raped by. I think it's Goofy. But Sleepy would suck too.

Clearly not a pedo joke, barely even a rape joke. Despite his "won't somebody please think of the children!" concern trolling, it's obvious to anyone with half a brain that Cernovich only tattled about this because Gunn works for Disney now and he once joked about being raped by Goofy. Weak.

14 Nov 2009

About to vomit as I'm stuffed with etouffe and eggplant. I'm Louie Andersoning my ass out (just the fat, not the little boys).

I have no idea what this means. I know who Louie Anderson is but I don't get the reference to little boys. Seems kind of gratuitous so yeah go ahead and put this one on the list, I guess.

12 Mar 2010

I'm auctioning off @mikaelahoover's anal virginity tonight at Night of #140Teets. It's for Haiti.

Mikaela Hoover is an actress and another friend of Gunn's. She also staunchly defended him against the accusations. There isn't even any rape in this joke, he's just messing around with a friend.

15 Aug 2010

The Expendables was so manly I fucked the shit out of the little pussy boy next to me! The boys ARE back in town!

This is another big one, maybe the most quoted of the tweets besides the alleged link to CP that wasn't actually a link to CP. The first time I read this one, I thought people were offended because of its language, but as I kept seeing it pop up again and again, I realized that people think this is one of the pedophilia tweets. Call me naive if you want, but my initial impression wasn't that the "boy" in the tweet was actually supposed to be a literal child, and after thinking about it logically for a while I still don't think that was what Gunn meant. Gunn is making a joke about the "manliness," the machismo if you will, of The Expendables, which is an action movie about a bunch of buff dudes shooting guns and blowing shit up. Seeing the movie made him so pumped up with testosterone that he immediately fucked the guy sitting next to him, who in comparison to Gunn's hyper-masculine state was just a "little pussy boy." It's pretty common to refer to a man as "boy" in order to degrade and emasculate him or make him seem like less of a man than someone else. Not to get too weirdly tangential here, but there's a whole racist history behind the word when used in exactly that context to refer to black men (note that I'm absolutely not saying that that was how Gunn was using it).

Why would an actual little child even be watching The Expendables? Honestly not trying to make excuses or justifications, that's the way the tweet reads to me and that's the only way it makes any sense.

27 Aug 2010

RT @lloydkaufman The first time I masturbated to Justin Bieber it was a joke, but now I can't stop! He's like jerk off crack! #fakeretweet

Another fake retweet, which Gunn even identifies as such in the tweet itself. I guess that didn't stop Cernovich from pretending to be outraged over it though. This one is attributed to Lloyd Kaufman, the founder of Troma Entertainment, where Gunn made most of his early shock exploitation films. Kaufman has also spoken out in defense of Gunn.

Cernovich and his boys made several tweets about this one, including retweets of things that Lloyd Kaufman and another Twitter user who commented on Gunn's tweet actually said. They kept hammering the point that Bieber was 16 at the time Gunn made this tweet, and it was therefore evidence of pedophilia.

There is a lot of retarded shit going on in these retweets (cue someone taking a screenshot of me saying "retarded" and using it to get me fired in ten years) but this might take the cake. The joke here isn't that James Gunn or Lloyd Kaufman want to fuck Justin Bieber (and even if it were, it still wouldn't fit the pedophilia narrative because Bieber was 16, not 9). This is not a pedo joke, it's not a rape joke; it's a Justin Bieber joke. If you remember anything about Justin Bieber from the time Gunn made this tweet, it's that the most popular thing about Justin Bieber was making fun of Justin Bieber. People loved to rag on his shitty music and his goofy haircut and his stupid dopey face and the braindead tween fangirls who loved him. He was like the personification of the Twilight movies. Jimmy Kimmel's first tweet was apparently about wanting to fuck Justin Bieber. That he was half a year away from being legal in New York is not the joke. The phenomenon of Justin Bieber as a pop culture construct is the joke. God damn.

1 Sep 2010

My new film: Jerkloose-A small town where beating off is illegal, & 1 high school kid jerks off in front of the others to show how fun it is

Okay this one is actually kind of funny. If this is evidence of pedophilia I guess every Friday the 13th movie is child pornography.

21 Sep 2010

Video: 100 Pubescent Girls Touch Themselves: http://tinyurl.com/33zwh4h

I guess people are still falling for this so let me spell it out for anyone who hasn't caught up yet: no, James Gunn did not share a link to child pornography on his public Twitter account and personal blog. If you had thought logically about it for two seconds you might have realized this. He's not Ted Cruz, after all.

This video was a rickroll that linked to this video of a women's choir singing the song "I Touch Myself" by the band Divinyls. I'm not sure how old the singers are, since apparently that matters even though the video is not -- I repeat, explicitly NOT -- pornography in any way, but they look about late teens or early twenties. Since the word "pubescent" refers to someone going through puberty, it's technically possible that they still fit the bill.

And yes, the link and its fake title were originally sent to Gunn by Huston Huddleston, who was arrested in 2018 for possession of child pornography. Pretty damning evidence of guilt by association, if only Gunn had been able to see eight years into the future. "Maybe he knew about it at the time and was in it together with Huddleston all along!" I guess it's possible. Maybe Captain Kangaroo knew about Bill Cosby too. There is equal evidence for both theories.

19 Oct 2010

The Hardy Boys and the Mystery of What It Feels Like When Uncle Bernie Fists Me #SadChildrensBooks

Yeah, pretty indefensibly dumb. There's an attempt at a joke with the hashtag but it's a complete misfire. This is one where he should have known better.

24 Feb 2011

Photo shoot with @AmaLea, @steviesparkle, & @Melissa_Pizza. Trying to maintain a semi-chub so that I'll look impressive in these photos.

This appears to be just a harmless boner joke, and one at Gunn's own expense besides that, but because he constantly thinks about children getting fucked, Mike Cernovich decided to manufacture some additional controversy and claim that "These were young girls in 2011 when he tweeted this."

In an earlier tweet that referenced this same tweet of Gunn's he asked Gunn how old they were at the time, so his sudden knowledge of their ages seems to come from this tweet by @ToreSays, posted just three minutes prior to Cernovich's sudden assertion that they were "young girls." Tore claims that @Melissa_Pizza was 13 when Gunn tweeted about meeting her in 2011, but I'm curious how she knows that when she only made her account in 2018, and the current Melissa_Pizza account has only existed since 2014.

When you delete your Twitter, it frees up your username so anyone else can register an account with that name. The Melissa_Pizza who had a Twitter account when Gunn took a picture with her in 2011 is not the same Melissa_Pizza who currently owns the username and only created her account in 2014.

As for the other two users Gunn mentioned, @amalea appears to be some kind of bot account and @steviesparkle is suspended. However, if we use the Wayback Machine to see what her page looked like in 2010, the year before Gunn tweeted about doing a photo shoot with her, we can see that she apparently already knew him even back then.

December 2009: "@james_gunn I have a new Gunn to apologize to for my drunk shenanigans : ) But I miss the hell out of u!!!"

December 2009: "@james_gunn i can't remember...thats why I apologize, I assume something retarded : )"

July 2010: "@Yarvo oh god that still makes me nervous & thanks @james_gunn"

But sure, I guess we can just go ahead and assume they were all underage girls for... no reason?

12 Mar 2011

This hotel shower is the weakest ever. Felt like a three year old was peeing on my head.

This is kind of gross and I get the temptation to immediately throw it in the pedo pile but this is not a joke about pedophilia. It's a joke about the water pressure in James Gunn's hotel room. I'm not going to argue that it was in good taste or that he really nailed the joke by comparing the water pressure to a small child pissing on him, but let's be honest about what the subject of the joke actually is.

He probably shouldn't have made this joke, but then again if it was the only one he made I don't think anyone would immediately leap to sexualize it when that wasn't the point of the joke.

12 Apr 2011

I want to go big game hunting but know it's morally questionable. So I'm going to split the difference and go big game raping.

I originally read this as another stupid edgy rape joke, with the setup that big game hunting is morally questionable and the twist ending of something morally worse being compared to it as the more moral alternative. Then I realized that I had completely misread it, despite the meaning being right there in the wording. The punchline isn't that big game hunting is worse than rape, it's that instead of shooting exotic animals, he's going to rape exotic animals. This is a bestiality joke. It still isn't funny, but it's not really a "rape joke" at all.

May 2011? (screencap too small to read date accurately)

I just downloaded that new Steven Tyler single. I feel the type of shame usually reserved for getting a three dollar bj from a maybe-[slur for transgender].

Same reaction as I had to the previous transgender tweet. In all honesty I personally think these two are actually the most offensive of all the tweets Cernovich turned up. Funny how Cernovich and his mates apparently didn't think so, though, since they only referenced them in low-resolution compilation images where Gunn's other tweets are much larger and more legible. Weird how that worked out.

18 Jun 2011

@Michael_Rooker Dude, I should have invited you - @cwotd was in your movie (Richard Christy). He said you had him castrate a little boy.

Again, no context for what this is in reference to. Richard Christy is another friend of Gunn's and Michael Rooker of course played Yondu in both GotG films, and deleted his Twitter in protest over what happened to Gunn. This seems like some kind of in-joke between them or a reference that they all understand. For all we know it's Gunn's over-the-top way of referring to a bris that Michael Rooker went to. I just find it really hard to be outraged over something I have no context for understanding.

[Edit 2: Mystery likely solved.]

19 Sep 2011

I'm doing a big Hollywood film adaptation of The Giving Tree with a happy ending - the tree grows back and gives the kid a blowjob.

I'll admit, this one is pretty bad. I get the double entendre on "happy ending" but it's pretty tasteless and poorly phrased. I get the feeling from a lot of these tweets that Gunn was just so used to being offensive and provocative that he forgot how to turn it down even when it wasn't the point of what he was trying to say. Like this doesn't seem like it was supposed to be a pedo joke, it seems like the point was the play on words with "happy ending," but he just blurted it out in the most offensive way that came to mind.

11 Jul 2012

Three Men and a Baby They Had Sex With #unromanticmovies

Stupid schoolyard edginess. Again, there's a semblance of a joke with the hashtag, but it's just not funny.

23 Nov 2012

Watching Trapped in the Closet, R Kelly's second best video after the one where he urinates on a child.

Not a pedo joke. This is an R Kelly joke. The joke involves R Kelly being a pedophile, because he allegedly is. This joke actually works and succeeds at being funny. It's like watching Cro-Magnon man finally succeed at making fire for the first time. Is it just coincidence that this is the earliest retweet from after Gunn got the GotG job?

22 Dec 2012

"Eagle Snatches Kid" is what I call it when I get lucky.

This is a reference to the "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" hoax video that was in the news when Gunn tweeted this. I guess that if you really want to be a stickler and look at it in the most technical of terms this could go in the pedo joke folder, but it's actually kind of funny and the joke isn't about hurting kids at all and I really don't see what there is to be offended by.

26 Dec 2014

This was the note attached to the Christmas gift from my 6 year old nephew. So touching.

Gunn actually left this one up because there was no reason to delete it. It's completely harmless and cute, I have no idea what point Cernovich thought he was making by retweeting it with the others. If anything it makes Gunn's six-year-old nephew look bad more than it does Gunn himself.

And that's the end.

But fuck my feelings, let's look at some facts. There were 38 tweets that Cernovich and his hit squad thought were damaging enough to use in their smear campaign. These included:

• 1 AIDS joke

• 1 fat joke

• 1 boner joke

• 1 masturbation joke

• 1 dead baby/cannibalism joke

• 1 bestiality joke

• 1 joke about his friend's anal virginity

• 1 Justin Bieber joke dishonestly framed as a pedophilia joke

• 2 sort-of-vaguely-racist-but-not-really jokes involving Mexicans or Mexico

• 2 jokes involving some permutation of 9/11 and possibly the Holocaust

• 2 unfortunate jokes about transgenderism that have not aged well at all

• 3 tweets that happened to include the word "pedophile" and apparently were objectionable for that reason alone

• 4 rape jokes

• 10 jokes vaguely involving some combination of kids and sexual situations, sort of (of which at least 4 are kind of a stretch)

• 4 jokes that were legitimately about pedophilia

• 1 joke involving Louie Anderson and a reference to little boys that I suppose might have been intended as a pedo joke if it made any sense at all

• 2 completely innocuous tweets that were retweeted for seemingly no reason

That's a grand total of 4-15 jokes potentially involving pedophilia, made between February 4, 2009 ("a damaged 12 year old girl who steals your money and accuses you of molesting her") and December 22, 2012 ("'Eagle Snatches Kid' is what I call it when I get lucky"). That averages out to approximately 1 pedo joke every 3 months for 3 years and 10 months, followed by an unbroken prohibition for the following 5 years and 7 months. If you narrow it further to the five tweets that are blatantly pedophilia jokes and omit the ones where you have to kind of look at them a bit sideways, James Gunn made approximately 1 joke about pedophilia every 11 months. Then he stopped.

Like I said at the start, these figures only account for the tweets that Cernovich and his shit-slingers thought were bad enough to bring up again. There may have been more that Gunn made that they missed. Those hypothetical tweets are irrelevant to the situation, however, because they aren't what got James Gunn fired. The 38 tweets I just examined are.

I've seen a lot of takes that amounted to "A few pedo jokes every so often would have been one thing, but James Gunn made literally thousands of them! He tweeted about it constantly! Nothing he said was even a joke, he just liked talking about pedophilia! What a creep!" Personally, I'm not too sure about that.

Thoughts?

[Edit 3: I tried to be as generous as possible toward what people are likely to find offensive, but I've seen several people uncharitably saying things like "So what if it was only 20 tweets! 20 is still too many! He deserved to be fired for 20!" when they themselves likely wouldn't even be offended by all the tweets included in that number. So just to be clear, 19 is the highest number of potentially offensive rape and pedophilia jokes (4 rape + 4 pedo + 11 gray area). In terms of being offensive to the point of being reprehensible, in my opinion there are only 5. See this post for further clarification.)