Delaware's Democratic Gov. Jack Markell was embarrassed when a photo of a scantily clad model appeared on a tweet his office posted about his appearance at an elementary school.
In place of the originally intended picture of Markell posing with local education officials, a shot of Estonian model Darja, also known as
"Precious Little," in racy bondage garb popped up on Markell's tweet.
Markell apologized Thursday. The
intended photo showed Markell posing in front of Warner Elementary School in Wilmington to announce an initiative to help Delaware's disadvantaged students.
Markell wrote, "An inappropriate photo was inadvertently sent out earlier. We are looking into how this occurred but apologize to anyone who was offended."
Markell's spokeswoman Kelly Bachman commented to
Delaware Online, "The lessons here are not to compose tweets too quickly, and there is a lot of odd stuff on the Internet. We just wish the accidental link had been a cat video."
Precious Little, dressed somewhat more formally than in the photo on Markell's Twitter site, seized the day with
tweets of her own, stating, "Regarding an image tweeted of me today, it was a harmless selfie/candid from a photo shoot years ago. I believe it was an honest accident. I don't deserve to have my integrity or that of anyone I know questioned because of a stranger's error."
It took Markell's staff just 17 minutes to spot and delete the original tweet, but it was too late to stop the error from causing hilarity on the Internet and the tweet from popping up on
Politiwoops.
Bachman told
The Wall Street Journal it was all her fault – she was uploading the event photo when a link with Darja's likeness popped up and was automatically included.
"As a result, the picture linked to the tweet was a random, unrelated, and inappropriate picture that has been on the Internet since 2010, and not the just-uploaded picture of the event," she said in a statement from the governor's office to the Journal.
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