Donte DiVincenzo deletes Twitter account after past tweets surface

·Staff writer

April 3, 2018 at 1:07 a.m.·2 min read

Donte DiVincenzo’s turn in the spotlight as the NCAA title game’s Most Outstanding Player provides a lesson on the perils of social media. (AP)

Donte DiVincenzo won Monday’s Most Outstanding Player honor in Villanova’s NCAA championship win over Michigan with a scintillating shooting performance en route to a career-high 31 points.

The Wildcats’ sixth man was not a household name, which prompted some digging into who he is and his social media past, which included some questionable tweets made when he was in high school.

Unfortunately, searches through his Twitter account surfaced some offensive and misguided posts from when he was in high school. The digging also helped explain this bizarre interaction with a reporter from last year’s NCAA tournament about the validity of his Twitter account.

DiVincenzo responded to the negative attention by deleting his account, which had been dormant since June 2, 2016.

Be warned, some of the language used below may be offensive.

Bro delete your old tweets @DonteDivincenzo pic.twitter.com/LwCJ0wciEa
— College Town™ (@CollegeT0wn) April 3, 2018

In 2011, he tweeted a Meek Mill lyric that included the ‘n’ word to compare himself to Derrick Rose. (The tweet has since been deleted.)

In 2013, he tweeted several posts freely using a gay slur.

Villanova men’s basketball tweeted a statement hours after the game saying that the tweets were not DiVincenzo’s. “Unfortunately a Twitter account belonging to Donte DiVincenzo was hacked tonight,” the “official statement” read. “None of the statements attributed to Donte are his – he has not used the account for months. The account has been deactivated. Please disregard any of these false tweets.”

But that tweet was quickly deleted, likely after a program spokesman realized a hack would not have explained tweets that were years old.

Villanova men’s basketball’s official twitter account tweeted, then deleted, this statement. (Screenshot: Twitter)

The program, as of late Monday night, had not released a second statement on the subject.

Much of these posts were made when DiVincenzo was young and provide yet another example of the pitfalls of social media.