Former Vikings Punter Chris Kluwe Pens Scathing Letter to Donald Trump

Former Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe has written a letter denouncing Donald Trump and his claim that lewd comments from Trump recently made public were "locker room talk." A taped conversation of Trump was leaked Friday in which the GOP nominee describes in vulgar terms about how he tried to have sex with a married women and how being "a star" lends him the privilege to kiss, grope and have sex with women whenever he pleases.

The conversation occurred in 2005, shortly into his marriage with his current wife, Melania.

At Sunday's debate between Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Trump claimed several times that his lewd comments were merely "locker room talk."

Writing for Vox, Kluwe, who played in the NFL for eight years and was the Vikings' punter from 2005 until 2012, says Trump's "locker room talk" justification is bogus:

When asked to justify your statements, you claimed that this was "locker room talk," and it's just how guys speak about women.
You're wrong, and only the type of wrong an over-tanned ham hock like yourself can accomplish, plummeting past the morass of gross incivility into the abyss of depraved sociopathy.

How do I know this? Simple. I was in an NFL locker room for eight years, the very definition of the macho, alpha male environment you're so feebly trying to evoke to protect yourself, and not once did anyone approach your breathtaking depths of arrogant imbecility. Oh, sure, we had some dumb guys, and some guys I wouldn't want to hang out with on any sort of regular basis, but we never had anyone say anything as foul and demeaning as you did on that tape, and, hell, I played a couple years with a guy who later turned out to be a serial rapist. Even he never talked like that.

The "serial rapist" Kluwe mentions is former Vikings safety Darren Sharper, who pleaded no contest last year to charges of drugging and raping two women he met in a West Hollywood nightclub. Sharper also struck plea deals to resolve similar charges in two other states, and he is expected to serve up to nine years in federal prison in Louisiana.

In the letter, Kluwe goes on to criticize the apology Trump made for the lewd comments:

I made a joke about Penn State that got me in trouble years later, because someone thought I was attacking the victims instead of the institution that allowed such depravity to happen. You know what I did? I apologized. I said I was sorry. I didn't apologize with "if your feelings were hurt by it"; I didn't try to deflect it by attacking someone else, or their spouse; I didn't lie to an entire nation on live TV and say, "Nope, that never happened." I simply said, "I'm sorry, I made a mistake, I'm accountable, I'll do better next time."

Read Chris Kluwe's entire letter here.

This is not the first time Kluwe has publicly criticized someone.

In 2o14, Kluwe wrote a piece for Deadspin in which he said he was "probably" released by the Vikings because of his political activism and support for same-sex marriage. In the piece, Kluwe called Vikings general manager Rick Spielman "a coward" and special teams coach Mike Priefer a "bigot."

Image via Freedom To Marry, Flickr, used under Creative Commons