Jeopardy! Champ Ken Jennings Defends Podcast Cohost’s ‘Bean Dad’ Offensive Tweets

Jeopardy!’s Greatest of All Time champ Ken Jennings defended his podcast cohost, John Roderick over the weekend after a thread of tweets about parenting when viral on Twitter.

On Saturday, in a now deleted 23-tweet thread, Roderick said that he once made a “teaching moment” out of making his hungry nine-year-old daughter spend six hours learning to use a can opener while he watched. He received a lot of backlash for the posts for what seemed like cruel parenting, leading to #BeanDad trending that day. His account has been deleted.

Jennings addressed the situation on Sunday tweeting, “Extremely jealous and annoyed that my podcast co-host is going to a dictionary entry and I never will.”

“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,” wrote Jennings in a second tweet.

Jennings’ response left some feeling angry since Jennings recently had to apologize for incentive tweets of his own, that resurfaced after Jeopardy! named him the interim host following the death of Alex Trebek. 

“You know, I really thought your apology last week was a good one,” one woman responded, with screenshoots of Roderick’s offensive tweets. “But now I see the kind of people you promote I’m not sure you meant a word of it.”

This is not the first time Roderick has made a controversial statement on the platform. He used the n-word and defended the use of slurs in a 2011 tweet. He also wrote about being “a student of Hitler” in a tweet from 2016.

A Twitter user recently brought up Roderick’s anti-Semitic tweets, Jennings responded with a tweet writing, “If we’re word-searching through old tweets now, it’s pretty easy to find what he actually thinks about anti-Semitism. On our show [Omnibus] he’s always the pro-Israel one!”

Alex Trebek’s final episodes of Jeopardy! are airing on ABC this week.