Don Lemon stares down death threats to call out racism & homophobia [View all]

Name: Don Lemon, 53

Who he is: News anchor

How he’s contributed: The host of CNN Tonight and self-proclaimed “Twitter king,” Lemon is fearless, whether the topic is Donald Trump, gun violence, racism, or homophobia. He came out publicly in 2011 in a New York Times interview about his memoir, Transparent, which details his youth in Louisiana and the years he spent working his way into the echelons of national broadcast news. Even before that, he revealed on-air that he’d been molested as a child. In typical Lemon fashion, his statement wasn’t planned, but a spontaneous and emotionally powerful response to a pedophile scandal he was reporting on.


With the advent of the Fearmonger-in-Chief, Lemon upped the ante, opening one of his broadcasts with, “This is CNN Tonight, I’m Don Lemon. The president of the United States is racist,” after Trump called Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations “shithole countries.” After two black men were killed at a Kentucky supermarket in 2018, Lemon called white men “the biggest terror threat in the country”—an assertion that resulted in a Twitter hate storm, a barrage of racial slurs, and even calls for his lynching. He’s been a favorite target of Trumpians, even withstanding a bomb threat made during the taping of his CNN show, and yet he just won’t quiet down.

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