I follow Florida reporter Rebecca Jones on Twitter (@GeoRebekah) mostly because of her amazing and ground-breaking coverage of child sex-trafficker and polymorphous pervert Matt Gaetz— like this and this. But yesterday I caught this among her posts:
But Caputo didn’t get fired for doctoring government documents and planting fabricated stories benefitting DeSantis or Gaetz. Last week, Laura Wagner reported that Caputo “is also, according to his own Instagram account, a landlord who opted to share, in disturbing detail, how he went about evicting a tenant living in a house he owns in Key West.
In a series of Instagram stories posted on Tuesday, Caputo chronicled the eviction through screen-recorded text-message conversations between himself, the tenant, and Caputo’s designated property manager, a person called Red. Caputo also posted a photo of an eviction notice, which identified the tenant by name. One conversation that Caputo posted shows the tenant begging for more time to move out, which Caputo denied; another shows Caputo telling Red that he hopes the tenant “enjoys the sex in prison,” and talking about how the tenant will “have a gun to his head in almost a literal sense because law enforcement will be there.”
The Daily Beast picked up on the story the next day, NBC Reporter Relishes Evicting Tenant in Bleak Instagram Posts, reporting that “A senior national political reporter at NBC News decided, for some reason, to share his delight at evicting a tenant in a series of mocking Instagram stories on Tuesday, according to a report. Marc Caputo uploaded screen-recordings of texts sent between himself, a property manager, and the tenant occupying a house owned by Caputo in Key West, Defector claims. The messages chronicled the tenant pleading for more time as Caputo refuses, referring to the tenant as a ‘junkie’ and telling the property manager he hopes the tenant ‘enjoys the sex in prison.’ In one post showing a screenshot of a message from a producer asking him to do a live TV broadcast, Caputo allegedly wrote: ‘…of course TV wants me on in the 2 pm hour. A live eviction wd make for good TV.’ When the property manager text Caputo saying the tenant ‘doesn’t have anywhere to go and nobody has any love for him,’ Caputo allegedly replied: ‘He will have a gun to his head in almost a literal sense because law enforcement will be there.’ NBC News declined to comment… while Caputo said his actions were ‘born out of deep frustration that I transmuted into mockery of a terrible situation.’”
Tuesday night Caputo tweeted “I’m leaving NBC News and looking forward to the next chapter of my reporting.”
I spoke with two members of Congress who have had dealings with Caputo and neither was sorry for his misfortune. One said succinctly, "I hope that Caputo enjoys the sex on the unemployment line." The other had an even harsher reaction: "Caputo," she told me, "has been running a journalistic protection racket for years. He’s quite explicit about it. He says, up front, that if you give him quotes that he wants from you, whatever narrative he has cooked up, then he’ll reward you with positive coverage. Don’t, and he’ll screw you. If there is a worse person in journalism, I don’t know who that is."