In an extremely misguided crowdsourcing exercise, Dr. Phil’s account sent out the following query earlier this evening: “If a girl is drunk, is it OK to have sex with her? Reply yes or no to @drphil #teensaccused.” As you can surely imagine, Twitter had quite the reaction to Dr. Phil’s casual musing on sexual assault, and the usually tame #DrPhilQuestions blew up with posts that ran the gamut from outraged to hysterical – something we also saw with #PaulasBestDishes back in June when news of her lawsuit broke. According to BuzzFeed, Dr. Phil’s team said tonight’s now-deleted post was “intended to evoke discussion leading into a very serious [upcoming] show topic.” A spokesperson then removed any belief that the team has 140 characters worth of competency by adding that the tweet “was not intended to be taken lightly. It’s based upon a recent news story, hence the #teensaccused label.”
