Dave Portnoy Rages ‘I’d Be in Jail’ If I Said What Don Lemon Said About Nikki Haley

Barstool Sports President Dave Portnoy joined in on the chorus of people bashing CNN host Don Lemon over his comments about 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley.

Lemon caught heat on Thursday morning when he suggested Haley “isn’t in her prime” at the age of 51.

This came after Haley, who launched her bid for the Oval Office earlier this week, called for “mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old.”

“This whole talk about age makes me uncomfortable,” Lemon said on Thursday. “I think it’s the wrong road to go down. She says people, you know, politicians are suddenly not in their prime. Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime. Sorry, When a woman is in their prime, in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s…”

His two female co-hosts pushed back on his comments, asking what “prime” he was referring to, but Lemon doubled down.

“It depends. It’s just like, prime. If you look it up. If you Google when is a woman in her prime, it’ll say 20s, 30s, 40s,” he said.

Lemon walked back the comments on Thursday evening, calling the remarks “inartful.”

“The reference I made to a woman’s ‘prime’ this morning was inartful and irrelevant, as colleagues and loved ones have pointed out, and I regret it,” Lemon wrote on Twitter.

After the comments were made, Portnoy took to Twitter to vocalize how he felt about the exchange.

“If I said today what @donlemon just said I’d be in jail. What a fucking idiot,” he wrote.

Portnoy’s comments come weeks after the Barstool president dropped his appeal in his defamation lawsuit against Insider for stories they published with accusations from several women of sexual misconduct.

Portnoy originally filed the lawsuit after the magazine published two separate stories from women alleging “sexual misconduct against Portnoy,” in 2021.

He has repeatedly denied the allegations.

On Nov. 7, 2022, a district judge in Massachusetts dismissed the lawsuit, arguing Portnoy failed to provide enough evidence that Insider acted with “actual malice,” or intentionally disregarding the truth, in publishing its story.

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