Arkansas's Courtney Fortson in trouble over tweet

Yahoo! rivals.com

Fri Sep 11 11:17am EDT

Arkansas's Courtney Fortson in trouble over tweet

This Twitter thing is hard. I'm telling you. There is oodles of existential dread over whether you're using Twitter "correctly," which is to say, whether people are enjoying your tweets or not, whether they care, whether you're annoying them, whether you should tweet more links or fewer ... it's hard. When a medium is as seemingly banal as Twitter, the message itself feels less important, even when it's not.

And then there's the ability to get in trouble. Few mediums have allowed celebrities and athletes such direct contact with an audience, which means that they can say things that get them in trouble more easily. This part is actually kind of fun. The latest is Arkansas guard Courtney Fortson. Fortson's troublesome tweet, since deleted, was in joking reference to an apparent on-campus rape at a fraternity house involving members of the basketball team; police had not yet made the investigation public. Big no-no. The tweet itself:

"Im gettin it at workouts like a dude who doesnt understand the word no from a drunk girl lol."

LOL! OK, not so LOL: Apparently, when a girl is allegedly raped in a frat house, university and athletic department officials don't really appreciate a good rape joke. Who knew?!

Fortson himself wasn't named in the complaint, and it appears the campus police aren't going to press charges against the three basketball players that were named thanks to apparent contradictions in the woman's story. (She says she was forced into sex; bystanders -- FRAT -- say she was lucid and agreeable.) But there is a lesson to be learned here: Very few comedians can pull off sexual assault humor. Louis C.K.? Yes. Courtney Fortson? Not so much.