HBO Max and McCarthy have pulled their fundraiser for the evangelical group after The Daily Beast reported its anti-gay and anti-abortion stances. As McCarthy put it, “We blew it.”
Melissa McCarthy and HBO Max have announced that they’re pulling their support for the evangelical nonprofit Exodus Cry as part of their “20 Days of Kindness” fundraising campaign.
“There’s no other way to say it: We blew it,” McCarthy said in a video posted to Instagram Thursday night. “We made a mistake and we backed a charity that upon further vetting stands for everything that we do not.”
“I want to thank everyone on social media who said, ‘What are you doing? Are you sure you want to back this?’” McCarthy continued. “Because the answer is, ‘No, we do not.’”
HBO Max launched “20 Days of Kindness” on Tuesday, tying it to World Kindness Day on Friday and the upcoming Thanksgiving release of McCarthy’s new movie Superintelligence. But Exodus Cry stuck out from the other charities.
The Daily Beast’s Tarpley Hitt exclusively reported on Thursday that Exodus Cry frames itself as an anti-sex-trafficking group but in reality works to abolish sex work entirely. Its founder, Benjamin Nolot, has called abortion a “holocaust” and homosexuality “an unspeakable offense to God,” Hitt noted. The group has spent years lobbying to criminalize the purchase of sex and recently launched a campaign to shutter Pornhub.
