ADL: MA Jeopardy! Champ Was Not Making Offensive Gesture

WINTHROP, MA — A Winthrop man was "simply holding up three fingers" when he made his third and final appearance on "Jeopardy!" last month and not using a hand gesture to signal "white power," the Anti-Defamation League said in a letter to former contestants who had raised concerns with the hate monitoring group.

"We have reviewed the tape and it looks like he is simply holding up three fingers when they say he is a three-time champion," Aaron Ahlquist of the ADL wrote to the contestants. "We do not interpret his hand signal to be indicative of any ideology. However, we are grateful to you for raising your concern, and please do not hesitate to contact us in the future should the need arise."

Kelly Donohue, a bank examiner from Winthrop, won $79,601 during his three days on the show. When he was introduced before his third and final game, Donohue held up three fingers then tapped them against his chest while holding his thumb and index finger together. That prompted 595 former "Jeopardy!" contestants to sign an open letter asking the program's producers to explain the use of what they believed was a white supremacist hand gesture by Donohue.

Despite Ahlquist's letter and repeated denials by Donohue, some of the former contestants who signed the letter remain convinced the bank examiner was trying to send a coded signal.

"Is anyone else feeling gaslit?" a former contestant reportedly asked on a closed Facebook group for former contestants. "We saw it. We know we did. But a lot of people (including the goddamned ADL) are telling us we didn’t. That’s some classic gaslighting."

On Monday, New York Times media columnist Ben Smith used the incident to illustrate how "smart people" can fall for a social media conspiracy even in an "unusually clear-cut" case where the allegation is "obviously false." Smith said he spoke with several members of the Facebook group who remain convinced Donohue was doing more than signaling his third appearance on the show. Some of them noted a photo they found on Donohue's social media profiles where he was wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat.

"The contestants ... followed the deep partisan grooves of contemporary politics, in which liberals believed the absolute worst of a Trump supporter," Smith wrote. "But they also contained a thread of real conspiracy thinking — not just that racism is a source of Trumpian politics, but that apparently ordinary people are communicating through secret signals. It reflects a depth of alienation among Americans, in which our warring tribes squint through the fog at one another for mysterious and abstruse signs of malice."