When April Reign joined Twitter back in 2010, she was met with the familiar frustration of a taken username. But instead of tacking random numbers onto the end, she opted for a simple play on words: @ReignOfApril.
“I decided I was royalty,” she said.
Reign has lived up to her commanding name. Since she cheekily tweeted “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair” in response to an all-white slate of Academy Award acting nominees in 2015, Reign, 47, has been at the epicenter of the online conversation about representation in Hollywood. Her viral hashtag transformed the way we talk about entertainment, and she’s now using another to try to take down the “Game of Thrones” creators’ next TV show…
As iSteve commenter Giant Duck pointed out to me today, the much-profiled “April Reign” appears to be merely the reinvention of disgraced Obama Administration lawyer April Sands, who was suspended from the federal government and from the bar for violating the Hatch Act against federal officials using their office to engage in partisan politics. (Sands was an ex-underling of Lois Lerner.)
April Reign/Sands is evidently such a mastermind at identity shifting that she kept her same Twitter handle @ReignOfApril all the way from 2010 when she was April Sands to today when she is April Reign, even though she was featured by Fox News and the Daily Mail in 2014 for using her @ReignOfApril Twitter account for partisan purposes when she was supposed to be working for the public enforcing our election laws.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa and Regulatory Affairs Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan today wrote the Federal Election Commission regarding another mysterious hard drive crash, this one involving FEC attorney April Sands. Sands tweeted under the fitting handle ReignOfApril. The voluble Ms. Sands has admitted to disparaging Republicans and campaigning for President Obama in violation of the Hatch Act.
And here’s an old screengrab of April Sands and her @ReignOfApril handle:
But then after April Sands was suspended from federal work and from lawyering, she evidently kept using her same Twitter handle to launch her lucrative new career demanding more blacks in movies. Here’s her epochal Tweet that launched a thousand thinkpieces about white privilege in Hollywood:
Lots more documentation of this hilariously dumb story here. This is a pretty interesting test case of what is and isn’t considered Fake News and Election Meddling, among much else.
