Drudge: ABC Spiked Story on Arnold

ABC News has spiked an interview with Rick Wayne, a bodybuilding friend of 35-years to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who described racist comments allegedly uttered by the movie star-turned-politician, according to Internet reporter Matt Drudge.

"I feel sorry for any talk show hosts who are opposite this broadcast," Drudge told his ABC Radio network audience Sunday night. "They're going to be compelled to talk about what I'm about to unleash here."

"I do want to alert this audience to a story that has been spiked in the main press," the cyberscribe reported. "It is an interview with an individual who knows Arnold Schwarzenegger quite well."

Drudge revealed that two weeks ago, one-time muscle man Rick Wayne gave ABC News an interview that the network "deemed too hot to touch," where he "accused Arnold Schwarzenegger of some very serious things."

Calling the ABC News-Wayne sitdown, "the interview from hell for the Schwarzenegger campaign," Drudge revealed Wayne's allegation that Schwarzenegger made a disparaging prediction during the 1980s about what would happen to South Africa if blacks took over the government.

"If you give these blacks a country to run, they would run it down the tubes," Schwarzenegger allegedly said, according to Wayne, who is African-American.

"Arnold was pro-Apartheid," Drudge surmised, saying, "If this was my campaign and I knew this was coming out, and I knew that the interview was in the can, I would be mortified."

A spokesman for Schwarzenegger's campaign told Drudge that the gubernatorial candidate's "memory was fuzzy" about the episode.

Last Sunday the San Jose Mercury News carried similar quotes from the Schwarzenegger friend.

"Wayne said Schwarzenegger defended the apartheid system and argued that white South Africans could not turn power over to black South Africans without ruining the nation," the News reported.

"At the time, I just thought he was an out-and-out racist," Wayne told the paper.

The body-builder also told the News that "he watched Schwarzenegger upset Jewish friend Joe Weider to the point of tears with his crass jokes, which included doing an impression of Hitler."

But Wayne said he later came to accept the remarks as part of Schwarzenegger's sense of humor.

"Today I don't necessarily think he's a racist," he explained. "How are you a racist and have a black guy as your friend?"

Still, Drudge said he thought it was important to get to the bottom of Wayne's allegations.

"It is my concern that we are electing people to office that we don't know where they're coming from, we don't know why they want to get in," he explained.

"With California in the trouble that it's in, we don't want to make matters worse. We don't want to get somebody in there who isn't quite what he appears to be."

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