Hartley Sawyer, who joined the fourth season of The Flash to play the Elongated Man Ralph Dibny, was unceremoniously sacked from the show yesterday after a number of very screwed up tweets emerged. Old social media posts being dredged up to attack somebody isn’t a new tactic in the entertainment world, but it has to be said that Sawyer’s sexual and misogynist tweets were particularly weird and disturbing.
He said that a good ice-breaker at parties was to joke that “all women should be in sex farms” and seemed to light-heartedly adopt a serial killer persona, saying: “I like women who are good in the sack! The burlap sack where I put my victims,” and “as a lad, one of my favorite activities was kidnapping homeless women and cutting off their breasts.”
If there were just one or two of these tweets they might be written off as very dark humor, but there’s a lot of them. Sawyer’s entire Twitter account has now been deleted, but screengrabs were saved of some of the worst and you can check them out below:
Sawyer has since claimed that he’s grown beyond this humor, saying:
“My words, irrelevant of being meant with an intent of humor, were hurtful, and unacceptable. I am ashamed I was capable of these really horrible attempts to get attention at that time. I regret them deeply.”
This apology fell on deaf ears at The CW though, who considered his case and brought the hammer down, releasing a statement announcing that he was fired.
“Hartley Sawyer will not be returning for season seven of The Flash. In regards to Mr. Sawyer’s posts on social media, we do not tolerate derogatory remarks that target any race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, or sexual orientation. Such remarks are antithetical to our values and polices, which strive and evolve to promote a safe, inclusive and productive environment for our workforce.”
It should be generally advised that if you rise to a position of moderate fame, perhaps it’s best to have a look back through your old social media posts and get rid of anything that looks bad. That said, most people probably don’t crack jokes about beating their daughter, assaulting their girlfriend outside a 7-11, mutilating homeless women and secretly spying on co-workers getting undressed. And that’s not even touching on the ones where he openly calls himself a racist. Yikes.
I guess there’s one thing that won’t be elongated: Hartley Sawyer’s acting career.
