Joy Reid opened her Saturday morning MSNBC show with (something of) a mea culpa, after a trove of homophobic blog posts were unearthed from her old blog, posts she claims were fabricated and inserted onto her website in a campaign to smear her reputation.

“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me,” Reid said. “But I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted and I have written in the past, why some people don’t believe me. I have not exempt from being cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for. I own that. I get it. And for that I am truly, truly sorry.”

After that opener, Reid introduced her panel for the first half of her show AM Joy, which included Jonathan Capehart, columnist for the Washington Post, Chase Strangio of the ACLU’s LGBT & AIDS Project, Zeke Stokes of GLAAD, Sarah Scanlon who worked on LGBTQ Outreach for the Bernie Sanders campaign, and Diego Sanchez of PFLAG — the organization that rescinded an award from Reid.

“I wanted to try to take this thing and try to make something positive out of it,” Reid said. “Feel free to grill me, you absolutely have the right to do.”

“But I also want to talk about the ways in which — some of the things that even I have said and done really do land and impact people in the real world,” she said.

Reid kicked off the conversation by asking her guests how her tweets mocking Ann Coulter for being transgender affect members of the trans community.

Each guest spoke out about the controversy, and the issues the LGBT community faces today. During the marathon, uninterrupted panel segment that went on for some 40 minutes, Reid’s guests expressed their appreciation for the MSNBC host. Reid’s dubious claims that her blog was hacked did not come up…

Watch two sections of the panel above, via MSNBC.

[image via screengrab]

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