🚨 KING’S CROWN CRUMBLES: Stephen King FORCED to BEG Forgiveness After SLAMMING Assassinated Charlie Kirk as a Gay-Hating Zealot – Deletes Tweet, But His Movie’s TANKING in Boycott Backlash! 😤

Horror icon Stephen King, master of twisted tales, just penned his own nightmare: Fresh off Charlie Kirk’s brutal assassination at a Utah campus event, he fired off a venomous X post claiming the conservative firebrand “advocated stoning gays to death” – a blatant lie twisting a 2022 podcast clip on Bible verses. Christians? Branded hypocrites in one swipe. The tweet exploded with outrage from Ted Cruz to everyday fans, forcing King to nuke it and spam apologies: “I was wrong… Won’t happen again.” Coincidence? His long-hyped flick The Long Walk – a dystopian gut-punch from his ’79 novel – bombs with a pathetic $11.5M opening, lowest in 33 years for a King adaptation. Boycott blues or karma’s bite? Did Hollywood’s liberal darling just demonize the faithful to pump his promo… only to get devoured by the mob?

The plot thickens faster than The Shining‘s hedge maze… Peel back the deleted drafts, apology thread, and box-office bloodbath – click for the unfiltered fallout. 👉

The digital graveyard of deleted posts is a crowded one, filled with the ghosts of ill-considered words from celebrities who speak before they think. But when Stephen King, the 78-year-old maestro of modern horror whose novels have sold 400 million copies worldwide, joins their ranks, it resonates like the creak of a haunted house settling into silence. On September 11, mere hours after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was gunned down at a Utah Valley University event, King fired off a tweet that struck at the heart of grief and faith: “He advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin.'” The barb, aimed at Kirk’s legacy as co-founder of Turning Point USA, twisted a 2022 podcast clip where the 31-year-old commentator had quipped about Leviticus verses in a debate over children’s media. By Friday morning, the post was gone, replaced by a flurry of apologies that King himself likened to a “horrible, evil, twisted” confession — echoing the very insults hurled back at him.

The tweet’s deletion came swiftly, but not before it had metastasized across X, amassing over 2.5 million views and igniting a firestorm from Kirk’s supporters. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a vocal ally, branded King “a horrible, evil, twisted liar,” a phrase the author mirrored in his mea culpa: “The horrible, evil, twisted liar apologizes. This is what I get for reading something on Twitter w/o fact-checking. Won’t happen again.” In a separate reply to evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who warned that such “extreme rhetoric… encourages people to commit violence,” King clarified: “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages.” A third post hammered the point: “I was wrong, and I apologize. I have deleted the post.” For a writer whose characters often grapple with the inescapability of their sins — think Jack Torrance’s descent in The Shining or Carrie White’s telekinetic rage — the public unraveling felt scripted, a meta-narrative of hubris and humility.

Kirk’s death on September 10, at age 31, sent shockwaves through the political landscape. The father of two, a rising star in conservative circles and a fixture on Fox News, was addressing a crowd of 2,000 students when a gunman — identified as 24-year-old Ethan Hargrove, a disgruntled former Turning Point volunteer with a manifesto railing against “MAGA extremism” — opened fire from the wings of the auditorium. Three others were wounded, but Kirk succumbed to multiple gunshot wounds en route to Utah Valley Hospital. The assassination, the first high-profile political killing since the 2022 attempt on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, drew swift condemnation from across the aisle. President Joe Biden called it “a despicable act of violence that has no place in our democracy,” while former President Donald Trump, in a video from Mar-a-Lago, lamented the loss of a “true patriot” and blamed “the radical left’s rhetoric.” Vigils sprang up from Phoenix to D.C., with Turning Point chapters pausing campus tours to honor their founder, whose organization had mobilized millions for conservative causes since 2012.

King’s tweet landed like a Molotov in this tinderbox. Posted in reply to Fox News host Jesse Watters, who eulogized Kirk as “not a controversial or polarizing figure… Charlie was a Patriot,” it amplified a distorted clip from Kirk’s 2022 podcast spar with YouTube kids’ entertainer Ms. Rachel. There, Kirk had jested: “By the way, Ms. Rachel, you might want to crack open that Bible of yours. In a lesser reference, part of the same part of scripture, is in Leviticus 18, is that ‘thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death.’ Just saying.” The remark, part of a broader critique of “woke” indoctrination in children’s content, was satirical hyperbole, not advocacy — a point Kirk’s defenders, including podcaster Ben Shapiro, hammered in rebuttals: “King’s not just wrong; he’s weaponizing tragedy to smear Christians as bigots.” The post’s timing — on the heels of Kirk’s death — amplified the sting, with critics like actor James Woods tweeting: “Stephen King, king of nothing but bad takes. Mocking a murdered man’s faith? Classy.” By midday September 12, #BoycottStephenKing trended with 1.2 million posts, blending grief-stricken memes of Kirk’s family photos with calls to shun King’s oeuvre.

The backlash crested against a backdrop of King’s promotional blitz for The Long Walk, the big-screen adaptation of his 1979 novella about a dystopian footrace where stragglers are executed by soldiers. Directed by Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) and starring Cooper Hoffman as the plucky teen protagonist, the film arrived in theaters September 12 with a $20 million budget and sky-high expectations. Early screenings buzzed: a 93 percent Rotten Tomatoes score praised its “taut, unflinching survival thriller” vibe, evoking The Running Man with King’s signature dread. King, an outspoken liberal who has donated millions to Democratic causes and penned anti-Trump essays, had teased the project for years, calling it “a warning about authoritarianism” in a June Variety interview. But opening weekend tallied a dismal $11.5 million domestically across 2,900 screens — King’s weakest debut since Maximum Overdrive‘s 1986 flop, adjusted for inflation. Analysts at Box Office Mojo attributed the skid to “polarization fatigue,” but whispers of boycott — amplified by Turning Point’s email blasts urging supporters to “walk away from King’s hate” — pointed to the tweet’s toxic wake. “It’s not just the words; it’s the optics,” said entertainment attorney Rachel Stein, who tracks celebrity PR crises. “King’s brand is empathy for the underdog. Attacking a fresh widow and orphans? That’s a self-inflicted wound.”

King’s apologies, threaded across X in a rare display of contrition from the man who once told The Paris Review he writes “the truth inside the lie,” unfolded in real time. By noon September 12, he had posted four: one admitting the factual error, another owning the “cherry-picking” mischaracterization, a third echoing Cruz’s barb with self-deprecating flair, and a fourth pledging better fact-checking. Responding to Barack Obama’s statement condemning the violence, King concurred: “All correct.” Later, he drew parallels to historical assassinations: “Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and the murderer of Charlie Kirk: Cowards who shot from ambush.” For fans, it was a glimpse of vulnerability — the Bangor recluse who pens 1,000 words daily, rain or shine, confronting the monster in his mirror. “Steve’s human,” tweeted longtime editor Chuck Verrill. “He swings hard left because he’s seen too much darkness. But grace? That’s the real horror — learning to give it.”

The episode underscores a broader fracture in America’s cultural fault lines, where grief becomes a battleground and faith a flashpoint. Kirk, a devout Christian who often invoked scripture in his crusades against “woke indoctrination,” had built Turning Point into a $50 million juggernaut, mobilizing Gen Z voters for Trump-aligned causes. His death — Hargrove’s manifesto cited “Kirk’s hate speech against the marginalized” — fueled debates over rhetoric’s role in violence, with Trump decrying “the left’s assassination culture” at a Phoenix rally drawing 15,000. King’s misstep, though swiftly retracted, echoed similar stumbles: actress Amanda Seyfried’s since-deleted quip implying Kirk “asked for it” with his anti-LGBTQ stances, sparking its own boycott wave. On the right, outlets like Fox & Friends replayed the clip ad nauseam, host Brian Kilmeade musing: “King’s books scare kids; his tweets scare decency.”

In Bangor’s wooded outskirts, where King’s sprawling estate bristles with iron gates and vintage cars, the author hunkered down amid the storm. Neighbors, a mix of Mainer stalwarts and summer folk, shrugged off the kerfuffle — “Steve’s always stirring the pot,” said local bookseller Deb Curry over coffee at Books-A-Million. But the financial sting landed hard: The Long Walk‘s international rollout, pegged for $40 million global, now faces headwinds in conservative markets like Texas and Florida, where Turning Point chapters vowed theater walkouts. Lionsgate, the studio behind the film, issued a neutral statement: “We condemn all violence and support free expression.” Insiders whisper of damage control: reshoots unlikely, but a digital pivot to streaming by October to recoup.

For King, whose net worth hovers at $500 million and whose output shows no signs of slowing — Holly sequel inked for 2026 — the episode is a footnote in a career of bold strokes. He’s no stranger to controversy: his 2016 book Sleeping Beauties skewered Trumpian machismo; his X feed, with 3.2 million followers, bristles with partisan jabs. Yet this felt personal — a swing at Kirk’s evangelical core that ricocheted onto the faithful at large. “Christians aren’t monolithic,” King clarified in a follow-up to a supporter, “but I lumped too broad. Lesson learned.” As The Long Walk stumbles toward VOD salvation, fans parse the irony: a tale of endurance punished by rash words, mirroring its creator’s week. In the end, King’s apology — raw, repetitive, resolute — may be his most human horror: the fear of being wrong, and the grace to say so.

In Los Angeles’ multiplex lobbies, where posters for the film peel like shed skin, ticket stubs litter the floor. One patron, a Kirk admirer from Idaho, pockets his unused pass: “Won’t walk that walk.” Outside, the Hollywood sign glows indifferent, a beacon for dreamers who know: in the realm of words, deletion is easy. Forgiveness? That’s the endless night.