Nicki Minaj went off on Don Lemon in a fiery post on X (formerly Twitter), Sunday night, hitting the former CNN host with a homophobic insult and calling for his imprisonment. She was mad about Lemon's recent coverage of an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis, during which he livestreamed himself alongside a group of demonstrators disrupting a service at Cities Church. They accused the pastor of cooperating with ICE, according to The Daily Beast.
"DON ‘C*CK SUCKIN’ LEMON IS DISGUSTING," Minaj wrote. "HOW DARE YOU? I WANT THAT THUG IN JAIL!!!!! HE WOULD NEVER DO THAT TO ANY OTHER RELIGION. LOCK HIM UP!!!!!"
Don Lemon's Minneapolis Protest Coverage
Minaj isn't the only person to criticize Lemon for his coverage of the protest. The Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon, also issued a warning for Lemon on X. “A house of worship is not a public forum for your protest! It is a space protected from exactly such acts by federal criminal and civil laws! Nor does the First Amendment protect your pseudo journalism of disrupting a prayer service,” she wrote, as caught by The New York Post. "You are on notice!”
While Lemon has not responded to Nicki Minaj directly, he did address the backlash to his coverage of the incident in a video on Sunday night. “The MAGA administration and the fake news MAGAs are losing their mind over something that’s not even true,” Lemon said. “I had no affiliations with that organization. I didn’t even know they were going to this church until we followed them. We were there chronicling protests. Once the protest started in the church, we did an act of journalism, which was report on it and talk to the people who were involved, which included the pastor, members of the church, and members of the organization. That’s it."
The protest came after 37-year-old Renee Good was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, earlier this month.
