After comments about Santa Barbara shooter, startup co-founder resigns

Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam posted a series of annotations to Elliot Rodger’s manifesto, calling a number of passages ‘beautiful.’

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Mahbod is my friend. He’s a brilliant, creative, complicated person with a ton of love in his heart. Without Mahbod Rap Genius would not exist, and I am grateful for all he has done to help Rap Genius succeed. But I cannot let him compromise the Rap Genius mission – a mission that remains almost as delicate and inchoate as it was when we three founders decided to devote our lives to it almost 5 years ago.

Lehman added an explanation as to why the site chose to annotate Rodger’s manifesto to begin with, saying, “The current version of the annotated document is far from great, but the hope is that the annotations will improve over time as the story unfolds and it will eventually be a good resource for people looking to understand this tragedy.” Moghadam’s annotations have been deleted, and he posted this apology to Twitter on Sunday:

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