Hartley Sawyer, who boarded the fourth season of The Flash to play the Elongated Man Ralph Dibny, was fired from the show yesterday after a number of very disturbing tweets resurfaced. Of course, old social media posts being brought up to attack someone isn’t exactly a new tactic in the entertainment world, but Sawyer’s sexual and misogynist tweets were particularly unsettling.
If it had just been one or two, they might be written off as some particularly dark humor, but there were a lot of them. And while the actor’s entire Twitter account has now been deleted, the damage had already been done, forcing The CW to give him the boot. Which is perfectly understandable. At least, to most.
It seems not everyone’s content with the network’s decision, though, as a petition has now sprung up on Change.org calling for The CW to give him another chance, and here’s how it reads:
Harley Sawyer played elongated man on The Flash and was fired over racist comments made 6-8 Years ago. I believe Hartley should not be fired over something that happened years ago and now is a different person. Help me bring him back to The Flash TV Series.
At the time of writing, the petition only has about 1,550 signatures, but it’s growing pretty quick and is obviously only a day old. Meaning it could be well above that mark by the end of the week. Clearly, there’s a notable chunk of the fanbase who feel that he shouldn’t have been fired.
But will The CW actually listen to this petition and bring him back to The Flash? Definitely not. While these fan campaigns have worked in the past – see: the Snyder Cut of Justice League – this one seems destined to fall on deaf ears. Sawyer’s tweets are pretty bad and we can’t imagine the network would ever allow him on one of their shows again. Even if he’s a different person now than he was when he said those things.
But hey, you can’t blame the fans for trying and if you want to show your support, you can sign the petition via the link below.
