Why the world is a bit done with Chrissy Teigen
From beloved to hated... She was once the uncrowned Queen of Twitter and we found her hilarious, now she has been knocked off her throne. A break from social media, multiple apologies, it doesn't seem to really help. What exactly is going on with Chrissy Teigen and more importantly: what happened?
It all started when Courtney Stodden came forward in May with tweets that Chrissy had sent her about ten years ago. At that time, Courtney was sixteen and she married the fifty-year-old Doug Hutchison. The latter is an actor you might not know by name, but you probably know his role from The Green Mile: he played Percy Wetmore, that terrible guard everyone hated.
The fifty-year age difference between that couple (they are now divorced) is of course striking and it is not surprising that many people had something to say about it, but Chrissy Teigen took it too far. Chrissy and Courtney didn't know each other otherwise, but Chrissy couldn't help but say a thing or two about it on Twitter.
Uh yeah, go to sleep forever? To a sixteen-year-old girl? Those tweets may have been ten years old, let it be a wise lesson: everything you do online is never lost. And so it came back hard in Chrissy's face ten years later. She took a break from Twitter, posted an apology, and said she had reached out to Courtney, something Courtney denied.
After a social media sabbatical, she returned yesterday with a second - more extensive - apology on Instagram. A good intention of course, but it probably didn't yield the result she hoped for. The opposite likely happened: even more stories came out from people who also had unpleasant online experiences with her.
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Project Runway designer Michael Costello shared messages between him and Chrissy that were exchanged in 2014. According to him, he is still traumatized by the events to this day and has long struggled with thoughts of suicide, until a week ago.
The reason for the online messages between Chrissy and him was a photoshopped comment on social media, in which it seemed as if Michael used the n-word, which was not the case. However, Chrissy took the comment at face value and went in hard. Michael reached out to Chrissy and told her that the comment was not real (she had openly called him a racist, after which he received a lot of criticism). Her response was that he should suffer and die.
Well, once again: nothing is lost on the internet. And now America (and maybe the whole world a bit) is quite done with Chrissy Teigen. Especially since all this came out after she spoke out about online bullying. Something she ultimately has also been quite guilty of. I fear that a lot of image repair is needed here.
