You may have noticed that Chrissy Teigen went quiet again on Twitter following her apology to Courtney Stodden. Well, this has been quite a saga that’s worth a brief recap. Back in late March, Chrissy quit Twitter (not for the first time) after writing that “my life goal is to make people happy. The pain I feel when I don’t is too much for me. I’ve always been portrayed as the strong clap back girl but I’m just not.” A month later, she resurfaced while writing that “it feels TERRIBLE to silence yourself.” During that interval, TMZ noted Courtney Stodden’s remarks about Teigen bullying her on the platform a decade ago.
In the process, TMZ published screencaps of several 2011 tweets by Teigen, who had told Stodden to take a “dirt nap,” among other trolling remarks. The Daily Beast then published an interview with Stodden, who revealed that the behavior extended to private messages (“[she] would privately DM me and tell me to kill myself”). This all resulted in Chrissy’s aforementioned apology to Stodden, which she publicly made and stated, “I’m mortified and sad at who I used to be. I was an insecure, attention seeking troll.”
Fast forward a few weeks, and Teigen has stayed quiet while fallout continues from the resurfaced tweets. She pulled out of a Netflix show, and unsubstantiated reports say that she’s possibly lost out on partnership deals. Teigen has now published a lengthy essay on Medium, in which she writes, “I’ve been sitting in a hole of deserved global punishment” that has involved feeling “crushing regret” every moment and day. She describes this recent period as an ultimate time-out, and here’s more:
“As you know, a bunch of my old awful (awful, awful) tweets resurfaced. I’m truly ashamed of them. As I look at them and understand the hurt they caused, I have to stop and wonder: How could I have done that?
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… I was a troll, full stop. And I am so sorry.”
Chrissy says she has endlessly reflected upon how she didn’t see red flags in her behavior when they popped up, and she says that she’s grown up and sought plenty of therapy in an effort at self-improvement:
“I wasn’t mean in my everyday life. More than once, someone would come up to me and say, ‘You’re so much nicer in person.’ Why was that not a huge red flag? But I took it in and tossed it aside. I did book signings where girls would call me a bad ass bitch, and I’d stretch my arm toward them as they walked away, looking at my friends and saying, ‘I promise, I’m not!’”
At the time, I just didn’t get it. Believe me, I get it now… The truth is, I’m no longer the person who wrote those horrible things. 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.
You can read Chrissy’s full apology essay on Medium.
(Via Chrissy Teigen on Medium)