Daily Times

Jon Cooper felt the wrath of a thousand ‘Freaks & Geeks’ fans, as well as actress Busy Philipps herself, when he mistakenly identified a photo of her younger self in character as White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

The mishap took place on Thursday, when Cooper, the chairman of grassroots organisation Democratic Coalition Against Trump, shared what he presumed to be a throwback photo of Sanders to Twitter.

“Sarah Huckabee Sanders even looked habitually pissed when she was a teenager!” he wrote in the accompanying Tweet. “I guess having @GovMikeHuckabee as your dad does that to you.”

The photo turned out to be a screenshot of Busy Philipps pouting in character as Kim Kelly. Philipps was not amused when she caught wind of the erroneous tweet, and took Cooper to task in a series of outraged messages.

“Are you kidding me? Is this a joke? This is me from ‘freaks & geeks’. Fake news,” she wrote, adding in another, “Also I look nothing like Sarah Huckabee Sanders. What in the actual?!”

“I am never getting over this. I am actually dead now,” she continued. When a fan quipped that Cooper was apparently a fan of hers, Philipps retorted back, “Apparently not since he thinks I’m Sarah Huckabee Sanders.”

“Also, pick on a woman for the insane lies she tells. Not cause she looks pissed off while telling them. I love women who look pissed off,” she concluded her rant.

Cooper Tweeted an apology with a screenshot of the offending tweet shortly afterward, offering his mea culpa: “I deleted this Tweet after I found out the picture wasn’t Sanders but rather an actress with a huge fan base. My bad!”

He also amended his apology with another thought, “My advice: Just because a Google search identifies an image as being a certain person, take that with a grain of salt! It could be wrong.”

Published in Daily Times, September 22^nd 2017.