Pro football player Travis Kelce has spoken with his brother Jason Kelce about the now viral videos of Jason smashing a homophobic man’s phone.

The incident occurred last Saturday before the Ohio State-Penn State football game in Pennsylvania. While walking to the game, a young white man recorded himself asking Jason Kelce, “How does it feel that your brother is a f***ot for dating Taylor Swift?”

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In response, Jason Kelce turned around, grabbed the man’s phone, spiked it into the ground, destroying it. Then he snatched the phone off the ground before asking the man, “Who’s the f***ot now?”

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Speaking on the most recent installment of their New Heights podcast, Jason Kelce said, “I’m not happy about the situation. Me reacting, gave him the time of day, and it also gave this situation notoriety. That’s what I regret. It didn’t deserve attention.”

He said that if he had kept walking, the incident would have turned into a “nothing burger.” Instead, “Now it’s out there, and it just perpetuates more hate,” he continued, adding, “The thing that I regret the most is saying that word,” meaning the anti-gay slur.

He said the use of the slur takes insults to “another level.”

“It’s just off the wall and over the line, and it’s dehumanizing. And got under my skin and elicited a reaction,” he said. “In the heat of the moment, I thought in my head, ‘Hey, what can I say back to him? I’m going to throw that right back in his face.’ … I know now that that was I shouldn’t have done that, because now there’s a video out there with me saying that word, him saying that word, and it’s not good for anybody.”

“That has been seen by millions of people, and I share fault in perpetuating it and having that out there,” he said.

His brother offered sympathy, saying, “I know it’s weighing on you, brother, that s**t sucks…. You shouldn’t feel this much … scrutiny.”

“The real situation is you had some f***ing clown come up to you and talk about your family,” Travis Kelce continued, “and you reacted in a way that was defending your family, and you might have used some words that you regret using, and and that’s a situation that where you just got to kind of learn from and and own. And I think you owning it, and you speaking about it shows how sincere you are to a lot of people in this world.”

“That’s just not who you are,” he concluded. “I love you, brother.”

While some social media commenters criticized Kelce for repeating the homophobic slur, many forgave him for throwing the slur back in the harasser’s face.

One commenter highlighted by LGBTQ Nation‘s sibling site Outsports wrote, “This video highlights a breakdown in social norms. You shouldn’t just be allowed to abuse famous people in the street, because you have your phone in your hand and want to make a video for attention. People who do this are degenerates. Kelce [was] right to smash his phone.”

Jason Kelce spoke about the cell phone incident during ESPN’s Monday Night Countdown, stating, “I’m not happy with anything that took place. I’m not proud of it. And in a heated moment, I chose to greet hate with hate, and I just don’t think that that’s a productive thing.”

“I don’t think that it leads to discourse and it’s the right way to go about things,” he continued. “In that moment, I fell down to a level that I shouldn’t have. So, I think the bottom line is, I try to live my life by the golden rule—it’s what I’ve always been taught—I try to treat people with common decency and respect, and I’m going to keep doing that moving forward, even though I fell short this week.”

While neither of the Kelce brothers has made any public statements about the LGBTQ+ community, Swift is an LGBTQ+ ally.

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