Never talk to the media. That goes double for right-wing media. They aren't your friends, all they care about is pushing their narrative. They will steam-roll you and ruin your life for ratings / views.
If everything had gone well, they would get a swarm of new users to the sub-reddit, people who thought this was a bad idea would dominate the discussion for a few days, but when the dust settled, the subreddit would be much better off for it.
The problem here is that the person being interviewed has a shady past. They have boasted about sleeping on the job, have had multiple allegations of sexual assault and other controversies, which people brought up all the time, which is the reason they had to go private.