Republican State Sen. Trudy Wade is in the midst of her 15 minutes of fame, although it may be longer than 15 minutes, and being called a “bigot” is not the kind of fame anyone wants.

Last week Wade got a call from a News & Observer reporter telling her that when someone Googled her name, what came up in the “knowledge panel” on the right hand side of the screen was a photo of Wade with “BIGOT” splashed across the bottom of the photo.

Wade’s office contacted Google to find out how to remove the image and was informed that Google couldn’t take it down. But after the reporter wrote an article about the image and the Drudge Report posted a link to that article on its website, making it available to a national audience, Google discovered a way to remove it from the knowledge panel.

As it turns out, the photo and image had appeared on the blog of a university student in 2012 when Wade was on the Greensboro City Council.

When Googling other North Carolina legislators, what comes up in the knowledge panel is from the state legislature’s website, and that makes sense.

So how did this image from an obscure, unverified blog in 2012 get placed in the Google knowledge panel?

Wade said that her IT people couldn’t figure out how to take remove it, and at that point Google wasn’t offering any assistance.

Wade was on Fox & Friends on Sunday, June 3, about the incident, and when asked if she was shocked by the attack, she said, no, because the liberal media was hard on conservatives and particularly hard on conservative females.

Google did apologize with a tweet, but Wade said that Google had not apologized to her or been in contact with her about the incident.

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