Giles Coren made an alternative Twitter account to send antisemitic message and defend his wife from critics

Giles Coren is no stranger to controversy or sparring with critics on social media.

Naturally, the confrontational restaurant critic has got his share of enemies as well - none more so than food writer Jonathan Nunn (@demarionunn).

The latest development in the two food writers’ feud is the strangest yet.

After a bit of online detective work, Nunn worked out Coren appears to have an alternative Twitter account that he seems to have used to post abusive messages and defend his wife.

How did Nunn work it out?

Well, the account is named after a character in Coren's 2005 book Winkler.

And appears to be registered with his work email address for The Times.

He even appeared to admit he owned the account in a comment on Saturday morning.

When indy100 reached out to Coren to find out exactly what’s going on, this is what he had to say about it:

I’ve got lots of Twitter accounts. None of them secret. Most of them I’ve forgotten the passwords for though. I use them exclusively for responding to trolls, of whom I have lots.

And when indy100 pushed him on whether he was confirming he ran the account, he said this:

Sorry didn’t mean to be unclear. Yes it is. I have lots.

The abusive tweets from the Pavel Pilnik account have since been removed but Coren said Twitter had suspended the account and he didn’t delete them.

But one of the remaining tweets shows Coren trying to win support for his wife by having his alter-ego criticise himself, which is… really weird…

Although Coren says he was never trying to hide the account, it was news to the rest of us and Twitter was full of users enjoying the reveal.

Now that Pavel is out in the open - the hunt begins for Coren’s mysterious other accounts…

HT: @demarionunn

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