Chrissy Teigen apologizes for past tweets: ‘I was a troll, full stop’
Chrissy Teigen is apologizing for her past “horrible” tweets, saying she was “a troll.”
“Not a day, not a single moment has passed where I haven’t felt the crushing weight of regret for the things I’ve said in the past,” the TV personality and model wrote in a Medium post published Monday.
The comments are the first time Teigen has publicly addressed the cyberbullying controversy at length. Last month, Courtney Stodden, who identifies as nonbinary, said in an interview that Teigen sent them a direct message a decade ago when they were 16, urging them to commit suicide.
Teigen tweeted to Stodden in May, saying, “I’m so sorry, Courtney.”
In her Monday post, Teigen said she is both “ashamed” and puzzled by her past tweets.
“I have to stop and wonder: How could I have done that?” wrote Teigen, the wife of John Legend and one of former President Trump’s fiercest critics in Hollywood.
“There is simply no excuse for my past horrible tweets. My targets didn’t deserve them. No one does. Many of them needed empathy, kindness, understanding and support, not my meanness masquerading as a kind of casual, edgy humor,” Teigen, who has more than 13 million Twitter followers, wrote. “I was a troll, full stop. And I am so sorry.”
In the midst of the Twitter controversy, three major retail department store chains reportedly dropped Teigen’s cookware line last month from their shelves.
Calling herself “insecure” and “immature,” Teigen, 35, said, “If there was a pop culture pile-on, I took to Twitter to try to gain attention and show off what I at the time believed was a crude, clever, harmless quip. I thought it made me cool and relatable if I poked fun at celebrities.”
“Now, confronted with some of the things that I said, I cringe to my core.”
Saying “words have consequences,” the “Cravings” author expressed remorse for her past comments, “I wasn’t just attacking some random avatar, but hurting young women — some who were still girls — who had feelings. How could I not stop and think of that? Why did I think there was some invisible psycho-celebrity formula that prevents anyone with more followers from experiencing pain?”
The mom of two, who in 2020 shared that she had suffered a miscarriage after pregnancy complications, said she had changed: “The truth is, I’m no longer the person who wrote those horrible things.”
“Life has made me more empathetic,” she said. “I grew up, got therapy, got married, had kids, got more therapy, experienced loss and pain, got more therapy and experienced more life. AND GOT MORE THERAPY.”
Teigen said she would “take some more time” with her family and was working on privately reaching out to the targets of some of her online vitriol.
“We are all more than our worst moments,” she said.
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