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Wrestler Goldberg says he didn’t threaten Trump; hackers did

Posted: Aug 23rd 2018 By: Rick Maese

Eight years after he was fired by President Trump on the “Celebrity Apprentice” reality show, wrestler Bill Goldberg appeared to be holding a grudge of sorts against the controversial leader of the free world. His Twitter account directed a message to Trump on Wednesday afternoon that read: “Why have you been threating [sic] me and my wife you [obscenity] just because you’re the president doesn’t mean you can make threats using your new found power we should go into the ring together no secret service just you and me.”

But Goldberg said in a phone interview that he didn’t send the provocative post, or another offensive tweet sent to Ivanka Trump; they were the work of a hacker.

“The guy fired me, but I have no — whatever. It’s not a political thing with me,” Goldberg said. “Somebody stole my identity, and I’m sick and flipping tired of it. It’s happened to me a number of times. We end up regaining our identity, our account access, but these people get no repercussions. They get to the point where they’re posing as me threatening the president of the United States — I’m just so tired of it.”

Goldberg said he reached out proactively to the U.S. Secret Service on Wednesday to make clear he wasn’t issuing threats via social media, and he said he is hopeful the agency will investigate the matter.

[Trump slams ESPN, NFL players as Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke defends peaceful protest]

Goldberg, 51, said his email and Twitter accounts were hacked into a week ago, and that he’s since struggled to regain access.

“I’m not Mr. IT, so I couldn’t go in and get my account back because the email associated with it is the one they kept sending the password reset message to,” he explained.

He finally wrestled control of his account back Wednesday morning and linked it to a new email address, he said. He suspects the hacker realized this and jumped quickly into action, posting for the first time.

“They were trying to get something out there as quickly as humanly possible to destroy me. That’s the only thing I could think of,” Goldberg said. “I’m not a rocket scientist by any stretch, but it doesn’t take one to figure that out. It happened and — boom — I’m in the car, just arrived to set, and I start getting texts from everybody.”

He deleted the tweets as quickly as he could, but not before they drew attention and started bouncing around the Internet.


“The less time that it’s out there for people to view it, the better it is for me,” he said, “because it’s not true.”

Why did the alleged hacker focus on the Trump family? The wrestler figures the hacker knew it’d draw attention.

“What else are they going to say? That I’m going to go after one of the Kardashians?” he said. “In this day and age, they’re on the same plane of what people want to listen to.”

Goldberg appeared on the ninth season of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” alongside Cyndi Lauper, Darryl Strawberry, Sharon Osbourne, Rod Blagojevich and others. He was fired by Trump in the sixth week. He played parts of three seasons in the NFL before embarking on a professional wrestling career, and he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame earlier this year. He hosts the show “Knife or Death” on the History channel.

Goldberg said even though he regained control of his account, he doesn’t want to be silent about what happened.

“I’m not going to be that sheep that does what everybody does: ‘Oh, thank God I got it back.’ I’m going farther than that,” he said. “I’m tired of it. For all the people who get used, trampled on and bullied, I ain’t one of them.”