Brookdale Students Want Trustee to Resign Over Racist Tweets

Middletown, NJ - A trustee at Brookdale Community College says his Twitter account was hacked. But some Brookdale students and professors aren't buying it.

As Patch reported last week, Brookdale trustee and former Howell mayor Joseph DiBella's Twitter account showed that he "liked" several Tweets, including one that used the n-word and another that refers to Obama as a "monkey."

DiBella, an outspoken Republican who has long used his Twitter account to express his viewpoints, said he never liked those Tweets, and that his account was hacked by someone trying to make him look bad. He even asked the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office to investigate, and it is. But now the staff at the Brookdale student newspaper, the Stall, is calling on DiBella to resign, saying they found 35 additional questionable Tweets that were either written by him or "liked" by his Twitter account. DiBella has since made his Twitter account private, but before he did that, the Stall staff archived his Tweets, which they say go back to 2014.

"As soon as we were made aware of his Tweets, we archived them, fearing that he would soon do something like that. We ended up being right," Alex Nichols, Brookdale student and editor of the Stall, told Patch. Nichols said he first started looking into DiBella's Twitter account, "On Sept. 1. A friend, a Brookdale alum, posted a few screenshots of his Tweets on Facebook, and we started researching to see if they were real," he said.

Nichols provided Patch with all 35 past Tweets. Here are two of them. DiBella says he never liked these Tweets and that he was hacked:

"He has 7,000 followers, and has been posting and liking vitriolic content for the past two years in some form or another. Unless he's been lost on an island for the past two years without an Internet connection, I doubt that he's been unaware of what's being put on his Twitter account," Nichols said. "It appears to me that he's just trying to save face."

The student newspaper is circulating a petition on campus asking the Brookdale Board of Trustees to vote to remove DiBella. So far, 80 Brookdale students have signed it, Nichols told Patch.

"I don't want this man misrepresenting a place that has done me so much good," Nichols said of why he launched the petition.

Will the Monmouth County Freeholders remove DiBella?

At the most recent Monmouth County Freeholders' meeting, held this past Thursday, many Brookdale students, staff and community members stood up and spoke about DiBella's Twitter account before the Board. The Freeholders appoint Brookdale's 12 trustees and they appointed DiBella in 2013. Freeholder Director Tom Arnone told the APP the Board will not act until the prosecutor's office investigation is complete.

Like the student newspaper, several Brookdale faculty members also say they do not believe DiBella's claim his account was hacked.

"If you had a Twitter feed and for two years, there were these awful things in your name that were expressed on this Twitter feed, you would have not waited until someone brought it to your attention or brought it to the institute’s attention before you went and asked the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office," Jack Ryan, a Lake Como resident and an assistant professor of English at Brookdale, told the Asbury Park Press.