The Aaron Rodgers-Molly Knight saga continues.
When we last left off, on Thanksgiving Eve, Knight had deleted her tweet sharing a story from the Wall Street Journal about Aaron Rodgers having “Covid toe.”
Rodgers had jokingly said on “The Pat McAfee Show” that he had the affliction. The Journal wrote the story up as if he were serious, and noted that it was a real after-effect of COVID-19 that included toe lesions.
Rodgers, 37, put his feet up to the camera at a virtual press conference to show he had no lesions on his toes, and lambasted the baseball writer Knight for writing the story. She did not write the story — she does not even work for the Journal — but she had shared it with a caption that read “This is what happens when you get medical advice from Joe Rogan.”
On Tuesday, returning to McAfee’s program, Rodgers addressed the whole thing again.
Rodgers said he had a respectful dialog with Wall Street Journal writer Andrew Beaton. The Packers quarterback had thought it had been pretty clear that he was joking, and noted that no one who covers the team locally or has followed him closely nationally thought he actually had COVID toe.
He then directed his ire towards Knight.
“I called out an individual who didn’t write the article,” Rodgers said of Knight, without naming her by name. “But that was the texts that I saw from all the people in the morning before I actually even saw the article. This person proceeded to take a couple pretty good shots at me about my own mental status, intelligence and personal decisions.
“[She was] definitely not without blame and then went on to delete her tweets later and write a very self-affirming message about her workout status and donating to her charity, and it sounds like a phenomenal charity. But, you are not blameless either. You tried to be opportunistic as well and jump on this train and slam me as well. You didn’t write the article but you decided to quote yourself in a tweet as well.”
After Rodgers had called Knight out at the press conference last week, she relayed the sequence of events from her perspective.
“Today I tweeted a link to a Wall Street Journal story about Aaron Rodgers, then went to a spin class and the local homeless feed where I volunteer,” Knight wrote. “Apparently he mentioned me by name in a press conference, because when I finished my work my social media feeds were full of unpleasant comments from Rodgers’ fans.
“I didn’t write the article Rodgers is upset about, but I guess in the grand scheme of things it’s not that big of a deal. I would like to thank Aaron for directing traffic to my Twitter feed, where I am raising money for blankets for our unhoused neighbors. It’s getting cold, and the number of people who need help in Southern California has ballooned in recent years, so every bit of awareness helps.”
At this point, the odds of this standoff between Aaron Rodgers and Knight ever getting resolved to their mutual satisfaction are probably approaching zero.