HONESTLY, my Twitter account was hacked!
A Suffolk County politician pulled a move out of the Anthony Weiner playbook when The Post discovered he was following Duke porn star Belle Knox — by claiming the account was hijacked.
County Executive Steve Bellone said that is how the 19-year-old Duke University student and porn actress ended up as one of the 267 people on his “following†list.
Knox, whose legal name is Miriam Weeks, made headlines earlier this year when she was outed by a fellow student at the North Carolina school for her extra-curricular activities in the sex industry.
Bellone, a married father of three who is up for re-election next year, insisted he has no idea how his account came to be linked to Knox.
“County Executive Bellone’s Twitter account, which is operated by his staff, has been hacked and an obscene Twitter account was subsequently followed,†said his spokeswoman, Vanessa Baird-Streeter.
“A formal complaint has been filed with Twitter and to the third-party software used to assist in managing the account. His staff has instituted stricter security protocols to ensure an incident like this does not happen in the future.â€
The referrals were made after The Post asked his account on Thursday.
Modal TriggerThe Bellone aide also said that “law-enforcement authorities have been notified and the Suffolk County Police Department is currently investigatingâ€.
There’s no evidence that Bellone exchanged personal messages with the porn star.
The politician best known for blaming a hacker for connecting him to lewd material on the web was the former Rep. Weiner, who later admitted he was a serial sexter. Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011.
He ran for mayor in 2013, only to crash and burn when new instances of his online dalliances surfaced.
Bellone was one of more than 105,000 fans tracking Belle Knox’s Twitter musings, mostly promoting her porn movies and other sex business.
Weeks declined requests for comment, as did Twitter.
This article originally appeared on New York Post and was republished with permission.