Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel Apologizes For Leaked Messages; App Creator ‘Mortified & Embarrassed’ By ‘Idiotic E-Mails’ From Fraternity Days
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has apologized for e-mails, which he has since described as “idiotic,” that he has sent out during his fraternity days in Stanford University after Gawker exposed the leaked messages this week. He says he is “mortified and embarrassed” for what he was written.
In the e-mails, the 23-year-old tech CEO encourages fellow Kappa Sigma members to get sorority women drunk enough to have sex, mocks another fraternity by suggesting its members are gay and refers to a different group of sorority members as “sororisluts.”
He has since apologized for the messages, sending the following e-mail to CNN.
“I’m obviously mortified and embarrassed that my idiotic emails during my fraternity days were made public,” he writes.
“I have no excuse. I’m sorry I wrote them at the time and I was a jerk to have written them. They in no way reflect who I am today or my views towards women.”
A Snapchat spokeswoman informed CNN that Spiegel had no further comment on the issue.
The news site noted that some of the e-mails were too explicit to be published, but some of them have been published.
“Hope at least six girl[s] [performed a sex act on you] last night because that didn’t happen to me,” the Snapchat founder wrote in an e-mail after a fraternity party, according the Gawker blog post.
In other messages that were screengrabbed by Gawker, Spiegel described a party “shopping list” that included “3 kegs, 5…plastic shot glasses, 1 ounce of marijuana, 1 kilo of blow (cocaine).”
In another e-mail shown on the blog he writes, “I’ll roll a blunt for whoever sees the most (breasts) tonight.”
The app Spiegel co-founded, Snapchat, is a mobile messaging platform popular with teens and young adults. It allows users to trade photos and videos that disappear after a few seconds. Spiegel developed the app together with his fraternity brother Bobby Murphy while attending Stanford. He left the university in 2012 before finishing his degree to concentrate on Snapchat.