You put the entire Atomic Spotlight of the World Media attention on you insinuating you are a racist, you add death threats, and getting fired from your job, there are very few men who would not knuckle under to such pressure.
Whether you did nothing wrong has nothing to do with it. When enough people hate you, it can cause immense damage to your life and career. This is just a salvage operation for this guy.
It's the only way he sees of attempting to get out of this mess.
He didn’t get fired. He quit.