Jenny McCarthy slammed rumors claiming her son does not have autism, calling the assertions "blatantly inaccurate and completely ridiculous."
Talk of the "View" co-host's 11-year-old son, Evan, began circulating Friday, Jan. 3, after RadarOnline.com published a story saying McCarthy has changed her position on vaccinations and stating her son might not have autism after all. (The piece has since been deleted, but it can still be viewed here.)
Radar's report cites a "new interview with Time magazine" -- a story that's actually from 2010. The website misconstrued the 41-year-old's quotes in the piece and falsely portrayed it as a "new" stance.
In the 2010 interview, Time's Karl Taro Greenfeld noted that some in the scientific community have questioned if McCarthy's son ever had autism or if he actually had Landau-Kleffner syndrome, a childhood neurological disorder sometimes misdiagnosed as autism.
In 2007, McCarthy announced her son had been diagnosed with autism after bouts of seizures and said she was able to treat him through alternative methods not backed by the scientific community. Even more controversially, she suggested her son's autism was linked to the Measles/Mumps/Rubella vaccination and began a public crusade against vaccines.
On Saturday, Jan. 4, McCarthy took to Twitter to respond to the rumors:
Stories circulating online, claiming that I said my son Evan may not have autism after all, are blatantly inaccurate and completely ridiculous. Evan was diagnosed with autism by the Autism Evaluation Clinic at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital and was confirmed by the State of California (through their Regional Center). The implication that I have changed my position, that my child was not initially diagnosed with autism (and instead may suffer from Landau-Kleffner Syndrome), is both irresponsible and inaccurate. These stories cite a "new" Time Magazine interview with me, which was actually published in 2010, that never contained any such statements by me. Continued misrepresentations, such as these, only serve to open wounds of the many families who are courageously dealing with this disorder. Please know that I am taking every legal measure necessary to set this straight.
A blog linking to Time's piece circulated on Reddit and spawned debate among users over the vaccination issue. Sara McGinnis of BabyCenter shared her opinion on why the four-year-old story featuring McCarthy has resurfaced.
"[P]eople feel a wrong has occurred and are sharing the other side of the story as best they can to fight what they see as misinformation," she wrote. "If she’s not going to openly talk about the possibility she and the diagnosis experts were wrong, others are."