Snoop Dogg issued a public apology to Gayle King on Wednesday after attacking her on social media for asking about the Kobe Bryant rape case in an interview with WNBA star Lisa Leslie.
King asked Leslie last week in a "CBS This Morning" interview whether she thought Bryant's legacy was "complicated" by a 2003 sexual assault charge. Snoop Dogg, 48, responded to the interview in an Instagram video by saying King should "back off, b----, before we come get you."
The rapper said Wednesday that he should have handled it differently.
In an Instagram video, he expressed regret for publicly tearing King down in a "derogatory manner based off of emotions."
"I was raised way better than that," he said. "So I would like to apologize to you publicly for the language that I used and calling you out of your name and just being disrespectful."
The "Gin and Juice" rapper was hit with criticism over his comments as King began receiving death threats over her Bryant question, according to King's best friend, Oprah Winfrey.
Snoop Dogg said in a post Saturday that he didn't threaten King and called himself a "non-violent" person. He went on to explain that he felt that King's questioning was "disrespectful" in the wake of the deaths of the NBA legend and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna Bryant, in a helicopter crash.
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It appears that the rapper's apology Wednesday came after he had "a talk with my momma," according to his video caption.
"I didn't mean for it to be like that. I was just expressing myself for a friend that wasn't here to defend himself," Snoop Dogg said. "A lot of people look up to me and they love me and they appreciate me, so I want them to know that any time you mess up, it's OK to fix it. It's OK to man up and say that you're wrong."
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Bryant was accused in 2003 of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old hotel employee in Colorado. He was charged with rape, but the case was dropped after the accuser declined to testify. A civil suit was later settled. The NBA star, who married his wife, Vanessa, in 2001, admitted to having had sex with the woman but insisted that it was consensual.
King responded Thursday to the backlash to her interview on Twitter, calling out CBS for posting only a small part of her interview with Leslie without providing the full context.
"I know that if I had only seen the clip that you saw, I would be extremely angry with me, too. I am mortified. I'm embarrassed, and I am very angry," she said in a video, directly addressing critics. "Unbeknownst to me, my network put up a clip from a very wide-ranging interview, totally taken out of context, and when you see it that way, it's very jarring."