Lucy Lawless slams Kevin Sorbo over racist Kamala Harris remark

Xena: Warrior Princess actress Lucy Lawless is ripping into her former Hercules: The Legendary Journeys costar Kevin Sorbo following a racist remark he made about Vice President Kamala Harris.

Sorbo went viral on Thursday night after he penned a post on X (formerly Twitter) that questioned the Democratic presidential candidate’s race, writing, “If Kamala really is black, have her say the N-word, let the people decide for themselves.”

His comment, which Sorbo has since pinned to his profile, comes after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed that Harris — who is the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father — “happened to turn Black” and now “wants to be known as Black” at a National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago last month.

Sorbo’s post was met with swift condemnation online from multiple X users including Lawless, who chose to address the situation with an anecdote from their past. “In his defense, I personally witnessed a time when Kevin Sorbo stuck up for a black man against white people,” she wrote on Friday.

The actress recalled the moment she alleges happened when she was on the Hercules set in February 1995. “We actors were sitting around and I bought up a news item. I said, ‘Guys, did you guys hear about that woman and her friend who were brutally murdered in LA? I think maybe the footballer did it!’ And Peanut growled: ‘Hey! I knew Nicole and let me tell you… she was no picnic!’ BOOM.”

Lawless is referring to the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown and her tennis instructor Ron Goldman. Late NFL star O.J. Simpson, who had gotten divorced from Brown two years prior, was a prime suspect in the murders, but was ultimately acquitted after a highly publicized trial in 1995.

Lawless claimed that she and her castmates “were all gobsmacked” by Sorbo’s declaration. “I said, ‘She didn’t deserve to be stabbed to death.’ He replied, ‘I’m just saying, She was a piece of work,'” she added. “It stuck in my mind because those Americanisms were unusual to us. But we knew what he meant. #DontGetMeStarted!”

This isn’t the first time Lawless has called out Sorbo for his inflammatory political remarks online. She previously slammed him for quote-sharing a conspiracy theory that stated it was “leftist agitators” who broke into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, not Trump supporters. 

After Sorbo captioned his post, “They don’t look like patriots to me…,” Lawless responded, “No, Peanut. They are not Patriots. They are your flying monkeys, homegrown terrorists, QAnon actors. They are the douchebags that go out and do the evil bidding of people like you who like to wind them up like toys and let them do their worst. #KeepingYourFilthyHandsClean #Enabler.”

In addition to Hercules: the Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, Sorbo and Lawless also lent their voices to the 1998 animated film, Hercules and Xena – The Animated Movie: The Battle for Mount Olympus.