During a live radio show on Saturday, Roger Stone, the political agent whom his friend President Trump saved from a prison sentence this month, used a racial slur while speaking to the host, who is black.
Mr. Stone was speaking on “The Mo’Kelly Show,” a program based on a Los Angeles radio station and hosted by Morris W. O’Kelly, known as Mo’Kelly.
On the show, Mr. O’Kelly questioned the role that Mr. Stone’s relationship and proximity to the president played in commutation of his sentence.
The host asked, “There are thousands of people treated unfairly on a daily basis, how their number appeared in the lottery, I suppose it was more than luck, Roger, right?”
Mr. Stone, who was on the phone, responded by muttering, “arguing with this nigger”; the beginning of his sentence was difficult to hear. It seemed that Mr. Stone was not speaking directly on the phone, but himself or someone in the room with him.
When asked by Mr. O’Kelly to repeat what he said, Mr. Stone let out a sigh, then remained silent for almost 40 seconds. Acting as if the connection had been severed, Stone vehemently denied using the insult.
“I didn’t, you’re crazy,” Stone told the host.
On July 10, days before he was released to jail, Trump commuted Stone’s sentence. Stone had been sentenced to a 40-month period for seven serious crimes related to obstructing a congressional investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign and possible ties to Russia. Attempts to communicate with Mr. Stone on Saturday night were unsuccessful.
Mr. O’Kelly continued the interview after the awkward exchange. After the interview ended and Mr. Stone dropped the air, Mr. O’Kelly explained to the listeners that he had continued to speak to Mr. Stone because his job was “to keep him speaking for his benefit, as the audience, and my benefit from having that conversation. “
Later, listing the television and radio networks in which he has appeared and the newspapers in which he has been published, Mr. O’Kelly said: “The only thing I felt was true, honest and sincere was that Roger Stone he said at the time that he thought he wasn’t listening. “
“All my professional compliments, all my professional acts of good faith went out the window because, as far as he was concerned, he was talking and arguing with a black man.”
The Stone insult was commonly used to refer to African Americans for part of the 1960s, but for decades it has been considered offensive.
Mr. O’Kelly said in an interview with The New York Times on Saturday night that Mr. Stone’s use of the word was “clear, discernible and unmistakable.”
It was the second time he had spoken to Mr. Stone, Mr. O’Kelly said, adding that he did not invite him to the show to provoke or incite him.
O’Kelly said he was “disappointed and dismayed that in 2020, that’s where we are.”
“It is the dietary version of the N word, but as an African American man, it is something I deal with quite often,” he said. “If there is one conclusion to the conversation, it is that Roger Stone took an unadorned look at what is in the hearts of many Americans today.”
Stone has been accused of using this type of language in the past, according to Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog, who noted in 2016 that Stone had deleted his Twitter account from inappropriate posts.
“The Mo’Kelly Show” airs on Saturday and Sunday nights on KFI-AM640 in Los Angeles and on iHeartRadio.
