John Roderick, who will now be known as “Bean Dad,” issued an apology on Tuesday after he shared a Twitter story over the weekend about teaching his 9-year-old daughter what he believed was a wise lesson.
The musician and writer is also a podcast partner of famed Jeopardy! contestant Ken Jennings, likely one of the reasons his stunt gained so much traction on social media.
Since he deleted his Twitter account in an apparent panic, Roderick issued an apology on his website. “I want to acknowledge and make amends for the injuries I caused. I have many things to atone for,” he wrote. “My parenting story’s insensitivity and the legacy of hurtful language in my past are both profound failures. I want to confront them directly.”
From that point, he attempted to explain the cold-hearted nature of the story and said his daughter actually enjoyed the experience — which he did not say in the initial blather.
“I didn’t share how much laughing we were doing, how we had a bowl of pistachios between us all day as we worked on the problem, or that we’d both had a full breakfast together a few hours before,” Roderick wrote in the Tuesday apology. “Her mother was in the room with us all day and alternately laughing at us and telling us to be quiet while she worked on her laptop. We all took turns on the jigsaw puzzle.”
Amid the bean tripe, Roderick also was blasted for past racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic tweets, which in the Tuesday apology he said were meant to be “ironic, sarcastic.”
Jennings and Roderick co-host the podcast Omnibus, which is described as “an encyclopedic reference work of strange-but-true stories that they are compiling as a time capsule for future generations.”
Jennings — the author and Jeopardy! champion who was chosen to serve as interim host of the game show following the death of longtime host Alex Trebek, who died in November after a battle with pancreatic cancer, on Sunday defended Roderick amid the criticism of his parenting style.
“If this reassures anyone, I personally know John to be (a) a loving and attentive dad who (b) tells heightened-for-effect stories about his own irascibility on like ten podcasts a week. This site is so dumb,” he wrote, referring to Twitter.
