Courtney Stodden accepts — but doesn’t exactly believe — Chrissy Teigen’s apology
Chrissy Teigen has apologized for bullying Courtney Stodden a decade ago. But that doesn’t mean the two are all buddy-buddy now. Stodden suspects Teigen is acting out of self-interest rather than sincere regret over sending comments like “I can’t wait for you to die.”
“I accept her apology and forgive her,” Stodden wrote Wednesday on Instagram, not long after Teigen posted her apology thread on Twitter.
“But the truth remains the same, I have never heard from her or her camp in private. In fact, she blocked me on Twitter,” the 26-year-old wrote. “All of me wants to believe this is a sincere apology, but it feels like a public attempt to save her partnerships with Target and other brands who are realizing her ‘wokeness’ is a broken record.”
Teigen had posted a midday Twitter thread addressing her history of bullying Stodden online.
“Not a lot of people are lucky enough to be held accountable for all their past bulls— in front of the entire world,” Teigen wrote. “I’m mortified and sad at who I used to be. I was an insecure, attention seeking troll.”
In late March, when Teigen — a model, author and entrepreneur — announced she was leaving Twitter because the negatives were outweighing the positives, Stodden called her out over a host of disparaging tweets sent around a decade ago.
But Teigen didn’t respond until after Stodden, who is nonbinary and uses they/them/their pronouns, talked about the situation in an interview published Monday by the Daily Beast. Stodden said Teigen didn’t stop at tweets; she also sent cruel direct messages.
In March, Chrissy Teigen quit Twitter over its toxic environment. Now she’s back, she says, for the random “belly chuckles” and online friendships.
“She wouldn’t just publicly tweet about wanting me to take ‘a dirt nap’ but would privately DM me and tell me to kill myself,” said Stodden, who became famous in 2011 for marrying then-50-year-old actor Doug Hutchison (“The Green Mile”) when Stodden was only 16. “Things like, ‘I can’t wait for you to die.’”
Stodden said Joy Behar and Courtney Love also joined in the name-calling.
“People came out of the woodwork to beat up on a kid because she was in a situation that she shouldn’t have been in,” Stodden told the Daily Beast. “There were a lot of celebrities acting like playground bullies.”
Teigen, who returned to Twitter in mid-April after a three-week break, seemed remorseful Wednesday about her past behavior toward Stodden — though her apology also seemed aimed at her social media following. Teigen focused on the need to make the apology public while saying she had reached out to Stodden privately.
“I am ashamed and completely embarrassed at my behavior but that is nothing compared to how I made Courtney feel,” the mom of two said in her thread. “I have worked so hard to give you guys joy and be beloved and the feeling of letting you down is nearly unbearable, truly. These were not my only mistakes and surely won’t be my last as hard as I try but god I will try!!
“I have tried to connect with Courtney privately but since I publicly fueled all this, I want to also publicly apologize,” Teigen wrote. “I’m so sorry, Courtney. I hope you can heal now knowing how deeply sorry I am.”
Model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen opened up on Instagram about her decision to stop drinking after reading Holly Whitaker’s ‘Quit Like a Woman.’
Stodden, whose divorce from Hutchison was finalized in 2020, has recently been writing a memoir and running an OnlyFans and released a new pop single, “Pleasure.” In recent years they alleged that they were “groomed” by Hutchison, who is now 60.
“I have a lot of trauma from that entire chapter in my life, and that’s the time where you’re developing — your brain’s developing, you’re becoming a woman,” Stodden told the Daily Beast, referring to attention in their teens for revealing attire, boundary-pushing behavior, heavy makeup, large breasts and marriage to a much older man.
“And as I’m forming,” Stodden continued, “I am being mocked, overtly sexualized, abused — not only in my home, but internationally — and it really did a number on my self-confidence and my sense of worthiness, which I struggle with today.”
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