Controversial activist Shaun King this week threatened to dox two New York Post reporters over a series of unflattering stories, saying he would publish where they lived in an effort to return the “pain and misery and disruption” he alleged their reporting brought him and his family.
In a series of Instagram and Facebook posts, King said he obtained the addresses of Post reporters Isabel Vincent and Kevin Sheehan and planned to write stories on them, just as he said they did.
“I know where you live. Where you used to live. Where your family lives,” King wrote to Sheehan and Vincent—and his millions of followers—in separate posts. “You can attack me. And giggle about it to your peers and your family. That’s fine. But I’m going to at least make it uncomfortable for you. You aren’t going to post about my personal life without consequence.”
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Sheehan, Vincent, and King did not respond immediately to requests for comment late Wednesday over King’s escalation.
The ominous posts came hours after he directed his legion of supporters to send identifying personal information on the two reporters, including of their homes and families.
“This is Kevin Sheehan of the @NYPost. He has been attacking me and my family,” King wrote in posts across Facebook, Instagram, and his website, all of which included his email address. “Send me photos of his home. Send me photos of him. And his family.”
Vincent was the butt of similar threats. “The amount of pain this woman caused my family is incalculable,” he wrote, asking for users to submit her home address. “Send me details and photos. Of her. And her home.”
King lashed out at the reporters over two separate stories published a year apart. On Tuesday, Sheehan co-wrote a story on how King defended his purchase of a $40,000 mastiff guard dog named Marz. The story, which was based off a report from the conservative Washington Free Beacon, noted how King used donor funds from his Grassroots Law PAC to make the sizable purchase. King defended the purchase as being necessary to protect his family from white supremacists who’ve allegedly showed up at his last three homes.
His attacks on Vincent, meanwhile, seemed to stem from a July 2021 story she wrote on King’s new $842,000 home in North Brunswick, New Jersey. The Post remarked at the time King’s very public reputation as “a champion of the poor and disenfranchised” seemed at odds with “a sprawling lakefront home.”
King deleted his posts from Instagram but noted in an email to The Daily Beast how the same posts were still available on his Facebook page at the time.
“In all of my posts yesterday and today I explain everything in great detail,” he wrote when initially asked for comment Wednesday afternoon. He later deleted the posts from all remaining platforms—save for his website.
In a follow-up Instagram post on Tuesday, King claimed the Post’s reporting—which included a photo of his home but not the actual address—led to the white supremacists showing up at his home and his kids having to change schools.
“Cross my family again and see what happens,” King wrote. “And I’m backdating this promise a few years.”
King further explained his threats on Wednesday. “Entire media outlets are using misinformation and dangerous information about me to make money to spread stories to harm me. And I'm just at a point in my life where I'm going to have to redistribute that pain back to them,” he said in a 10-minute episode of his daily podcast titled The Breakdown. “What you have tried to give to me I returned back to you. And so when you attack me publicly, spreading misinformation about me and my family and causing us to be unsafe. I will return all of that back to you when you show people where I live.”
He continued, echoing the sentiment of his now-deleted social-media posts: “When you do that, I will return it back to you. This is the game you introduced. You started this. You have caused pain and misery and disruption in my family. And I have to return that back to your family.”
King, a public activist who boasts millions of followers across his social platforms, has repeatedly come under intense scrutiny for his fundraising efforts and discrepancies in the cash he raised. The Daily Beast reported in 2020 how King raised millions of dollars for his ambitious reboot of Frederick Douglass newspaper The North Star yet failed to deliver on many of the promises he made.
Five years before that, Beast columnist Goldie Taylor raised questions about how “King collected millions of dollars for everyone from Haitian orphans to the families of black men and children killed by police across America. Some of that money went to survivors or victims’ families, but much of the largess either went into failed projects, King’s own pockets, or is unaccounted for.” And in 2019, fellow star Black Lives Matter activist Deray Mckesson wrote a lengthy blog post slamming “bully” King’s “unethical behavior” and calling on him to refrain from fundraising any further.
King also came under fire last year from the mother of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Black boy killed by Ohio police in 2014, after the activist allegedly raised money in her son’s name without her knowledge. In a scathing, now-deleted Instagram post, Samaria Rice wrote: “I never gave you permission to raise nothing. Along with the United States, you robbed me for the death of my son.”
