Snoop Dogg, a Lakers fan and friend of the late Kobe Bryant, has apologized to CBS News anchor Gayle King for his blistering criticism of her over her interview with former basketball star Lisa Leslie.

“Two wrongs don’t make no right. when you’re wrong, you gotta fix it,” he said in an Instagram post on Wednesday.

“So with that being said, Gayle King, I publicly tore you down by coming at you in a derogatory manner based off of emotions of me being angry at a question you asked. Overreacted,” he said. “I should have handled it way different than that, I was raised way better than that, so I would like to apologize publicly for the language that I used and calling you out your name and just being disrespectful.”

In the interview with WNBA basketball player Lisa Leslie, King brought up Bryant’s 2003 rape charge. The criminal case against Bryant was dropped after his accuser refused to testify, although the woman filed a civil lawsuit which was settled out of court in 2005.

“It’s been said that his legacy is complicated because of a sexual assault charge,” King said to Leslie, who was friends with Bryant. 

“How dare you try to tarnish my boy’s reputation. Respect the family and back off. before we come get you,” Snoop told King in a video that was posted to Twitter.

Snoop was not alone in his criticism. Other critics who accused King of crossing the line included 50 Cent,  LeBron James and Bill Cosby.

But his comments were among the most inflammatory and seen as a threat. Oprah Winfrey, King’s best friend, said that King was “not doing well” and getting death threats because of the interview.

An avalanche of support came in for King. Her defenders included former Obama security advisor Susan Rice, the head of CBS News and award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who said the Black men who attacked King “should be better”.

“Black men, perhaps more than other men, have some inkling of what it’s like to have a body that can be taken for someone else’s pleasure,” Coates wrote on Instagram. “We did not calmly express our dislike of the question. We were too weak for that. We threatened. We dragged. And we attacked. It’s wrong. We should want more. We should be better.”

Snoop Dogg was also heavily criticized in essays in Black media, including one in The Root that accused him of hating black women, AP reported.

“Maiysha Kai deconstructed the explicit misogyny in Snoop’s response to Gayle and the tens of thousands of digital and spiritual co-signs it received,” author Damon Young (“What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker”) wrote for The Root.

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In Wednesday’s post, Snoop Dogg said he’d had a talk with his mother that set him right. He offered a full apology.

“I didn’t mean for it to be like that. I was just expressing myself for a friend that wasn’t there to defend himself,” he said.

He also said that he knows he is seen as a role model.

“Anytime you mess up, it’s OK to fix it, it’s OK to man up to say that you’re wrong,” he said. “I apologize. hopefully we can sit down and talk, privately.”

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When I first met @gayleking she was hurrying off set and into the green room with a copy of my book. Post-its were poking out of the pages. Pages were dog-eared. I seem to remember her having questions scrawled on yellow legal paper. This was impressive. You’d be surprised how many interviewers are just master bullshit artists. Not Gayle. She reads. She studies. She prepares. I’ve benefited from Gayle’s preparation multiple times since that first interview. I’m trying to think of another journalist more instrumental in whatever awareness people have of my work, and I can’t. I say this as a black writer. I say this as a black man. It is perhaps naive to expect black men to be better—oppression is always demeaning and rarely ennobling. But black men, perhaps more than other men, have some inkling of what it’s like to have a body that can be taken for someone else’s pleasure. Indeed, we know more than we want to say, because if we ever said it all we might never stop crying. Maybe that really is the root of this. It’s certainly not about “protecting” anyone’s memory or their families. Men who want to hurt have been using the language of “protection” all my life. It’s certainly isn’t about Weinstein. Only a fool tolerates serial killing because Ted Bundy was once a neighbor. Whatever it’s about, there’s really no way to be neutral here. Gayle King dared speak of a man as though he were one, and a lot of us fucking lost it. We did not calmly express our dislike of the question. We were too weak for that. We threatened. We dragged. And we attacked. A friend, watching all this said, “damn, Gayle has a son.” To which I could only respond, “these dudes have sons too.” And this is what we’re teaching them. It’s wrong. We should want more. We should be better.

A post shared by Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisipcoates) on Feb 9, 2020 at 12:25pm PST