It was around the same time that Breitbart contacted Vicki Pate, who has been investigating King’s claims for several years. Pate provided key documents that appear to show that King has two white parents and that he has been lying to the public about his race.
One of them is his birth certificate, listing his parents as Naomi Kay Fleming and Jeffery Wayne King and a birth date of September 17, 1979 in Versailles, Kentucky. King had already told journalists his mother was white. So all that remained for Pate to determine was whether his father was white too.
King has always claimed that his father is black. But King’s father, Jeffery, is white, says Pate. She points to a man born 11 November 1955 in Campbell, Kentucky who has been the subject of multiple arrests, including for motoring and drug offences. That birth date would make him 23 at the time of Shaun King’s birth, the same age given on Shaun’s birth certificate.
The Jeffery Wayne King whose name and date of birth concord with Shaun King’s birth certificate is pictured below, in a 2007 police mug shot. Various documents give his name as “Jeffery” and “Jeffrey” Wayne King, names which are common variants of one another, but King Snr’s date of birth and place of residence is the same in all records.
What’s more, Pate says she has definitively linked the man pictured in these mugshots to Shaun King via Shaun’s brother, Kentucky Air Guard Russ King, who is also clearly caucasian. Finally, public records show only one J Wayne King in the state.
Jeffery Wayne King in 2007
By 2015, Shaun King had finessed his account of growing up black and suffering discrimination. “I was raised in rural Kentucky,” he told the blog Generation Progress. “It was actually pretty rough. African Americans faced a lot of racism and discrimination growing up. I never really experienced overt racism myself until high school,” he claimed.
“I was put into a weird position when a huge group of students (who called themselves “rednecks”) hated me for no reason.”
King must have known while giving interviews as late as 2015 that Vicki Pate was tracking down his family history. But he continued to deliver craftily-worded answers to interview questions that gave the impression he was a person of color and that he had been the victim of hate crimes.
Neither is true, says Pate. She told Breitbart last night that King has never denied her accusations. “Shaun King has not denied the story to me, or anyone else, as far as I know,” she said. “Whenever it is mentioned on Twitter he simply blocks whoever is asking and reports them for ‘harassment.’ He did reply to one person but only to say, ‘Haters gonna hate.’ I myself have been suspended from Twitter just for posing the question.”
King did not return multiple requests for comment via email and social media. He has since blocked us, too.
Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Twitter or write to him at milo@breitbart.com.
His father
