The sports blog that published a viral hit piece on a young Kansas City Chiefs fan over his Native American game-day costume added an editor’s note to the post on Thursday, saying the NFL — and not the nine-year-old fan — was the intended target.
Authored by senior writer Carron Phillips, the original story was headlined, “The NFL needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in Black face, Native headdress.” The piece urged the NFL to publicly condemn the boy for being insensitive towards the minority groups.
Holden Armenta had “found a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time,” Phillips argued.
Shannon Holden, the boy’s mother, responded by informing the public that her son is of Native American heritage, as his grandfather is a business committee member of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians.
“This has nothing to do with the NFL,” Shannon Holden wrote on Facebook. “Also, CBS showed him multiple times and this is the photo people chose to blast to create division. He is Native American – just stop already.”
While the Deadspin article used an image which only showed the half of Armenta’s face that was painted black to substantiate the claim that he was wearing “blackface,” other images show that the other side of his face was painted red for the Chiefs.
In a Thursday editor’s note, Deadspin offered a half-hearted apology to the boy for the hate he’s received since the incident, assuring that its “intended focus was on the NFL and its checkered history on race, an issue which our writer has covered extensively for Deadspin.”
Three years ago, the Chiefs banned fans from wearing headdresses in Arrowhead Stadium, as well as face painting that “appropriates American Indian cultures and traditions,” according to Deadspin. Its upset was over the fact that the NFL failed to extend those rules to the entire league, Deadspin complained.
“We regret any suggestion that we were attacking the fan,” the note added. “To that end, our story was updated on Dec. 7 to remove any photos, tweets, links, or otherwise identifying information about the fan. We have also revised the headline to better reflect the substance of the story.”
This week, the family of young Armenta threatened to sue the outlet for publishing what they saw as defamatory claims. Holden Armenta’s parents, Shannon and Raul, hired law firm Clare Locke LLP to compel Deadspin to retract the story.
The parents also warned that they may launch legal action against Phillips, the publication, publisher G/O Media, and Great Hill Partners in a letter obtained by NewsNation.
“These articles, posts on X and photos about Holden and his parents must be retracted immediately,” the letter said. “It is not enough to quietly remove a tweet from X or disable the article from Deadspin’s website. You must publish your retractions and issue an apology to my clients with the same prominence and fanfare with which you defamed them.”