Meet The Porn Connoisseur Behind Ogg’s Public Affairs Strategy
John Donnelly is a man who won’t be bound by any one form of storytelling. Though it was Donnelly’s time as an anchor at Fox News 26 that thrust him into the local spotlight, today he services District Attorney Kim Ogg—playing a dominant role on her public affairs team. But it’s Donnelly’s trailblazing use of Twitter that’s pegged him as a news story.
On Tuesday, Mr. Donnelly strapped on his media relations hat and logged onto Twitter.com to tease his media relations prowess—shooting off confrontational tweets at a journalist who posted the last words of a man whom the state of Texas executed on Monday evening. The man, Gary Green, used those final words to express his deep remorse and to tell the victim's family members—his in-laws—that he never stopped loving them. Donnelly took the opportunity to fire back a snarky tweet at the journalist, asking: “Are you going to post the last words of his victims, too?”
They just don’t teach that kind of skillful relationship building in journalism school. However, media relation skills are not the only innovation Mr. Donnelly is bringing to the Twitterverse. In addition to using his Twitter account to argue with reporters, Donnelly also uses it to curate a collection of adult entertainment—“liking” multiple posts of extremely explicit content.
Sources tell Houston Watch that Mr. Donnelly is someone who embraces the melting pot that is Houston, the nearly infinite varieties of food and culture and people that make the nation’s fourth most populous city vibrate. And that appreciation of diversity really shines through in Mr. Donnelly’s Twitter curation:
First, Mr. Donnelly “liked” Scissors World, and specifically a photograph of two nude women engaging in a sexual act colloquially known as “scissoring,” which you can google here if no mental image is populating in your mindspace (or, you can click here for a screen grab shared on Twitter).
Donnelly also “liked” a post from a Twitter account known as “The Bate Club”, which describes itself as a “Mutual Masturbation in #Houston” and invites readers—like Donnelly—to “be part of The Bate Club”.
Donnelly also “liked” a video from a Fort Worth–based account called “Hotwife_BB”, titled “Queen of Spades.” (editorial note: “spade” can be interpreted as a racial slur denigrating people who are Black). The video depicts a Black man and a white woman engaged in a sexual act known as “doggy style”. The author of the tweet tagged the video with phrases such as: #interracialsex, #slutwife, and #cuckold.
It’s unclear whether DA Ogg has created a hiring rubric that prioritizes fetishes and other unusual social media behavior, but if not, she has, like a magnet, seemed to draw these sorts of staff to her office.
Like Mr. Donnelly, Ogg’s former communications director, Dane Schiller, was exposed for his peculiar social media habits, specifically Mr. Schiller created a pseudonym called “DudeGoggles” which he used to make sex and prison rape jokes.
Then there’s Waymond Wesley, a former prosecutor in Ogg’s office who resigned just weeks ago after Mr. Wesley trended on Twitter when the social media sites’ users unearthed “colorist, misogynist, and anti-fat tweets”, as BuzzFeed reported. While Houston Watch cannot confirm that hiring for social media peculiarities is part of the office’s standard procedures, it is notable that District Attorney Ogg did not immediately publicly condemn any of these actions—in fact, Ogg initially defended Mr. Wesley.
Houston Watch exists to report the news, not evaluate the personal habits of Harris County prosecutors and communications professionals. However, like the separation between church and state, there also needs to be a separation between adult entertainment curation and the hours that taxpayers are paying county employees to secure justice on behalf of crime victims. Houston Watch has reached out unsuccessfully to the District Attorney’s Office to ask for browser history and time stamp records that could help ensure the public that Mr. Donnelly is cruising Twitter’s red light district on his own time.