At this point in 2021, even the most passive Instagram scroller knows that Chrissy Teigen lives her life very publicly for us all to consume—and judge. Whether documenting her journey of discovering face gems on Insta or Tweeting “anyone else regretting some overzealous down there laser-ing,” oversharing has kind of been Chrissy’s thing. And we’ve all eaten it all up, because most celebs of her caliber tend to be cagey and private about their lives out of the spotlight.
Which means no one was surprised when Chrissy went ahead and took the classic Insta-apology to new heights in mid-June, offering us all a new perspective from inside her bubble. For those wondering why she needed to take to her grid to offer a public expression of regret, let’s get into it. See, back in the early 2010’s Chrissy had a pretty nasty habit of tweeting terribly damaging things about Courtney Stodden, who identifies as non-binary. At the time, they were just 16 and married to the 50-year-old acting coach, Doug Hutchison. While the media had a field day picking apart the odd pairing—and often placing the brunt of the blame on Courtney—it has since become clear that they were just a child trapped in an abusive relationship with an older man. And they certainly did not deserve to receive tweets from Chrissy that read “what drug makes you do that with your mouth? asking for a friend who really wants to know how to look like an idiot. thanks.” And “i hate you.”
Those messages were resurfaced in March of this year as Courtney began rehashing the entire ordeal, and they told The Daily Beast that Chrissy would often DM them, encouraging them to kill themself. Whew. And when Chrissy decided to take a break from Twitter after some bullying, Courtney called her out for being a hypocrite, which led to Chrissy’s first social media apology: a Twitter thread. Which was then followed by her aforementioned elevation of the Insta-apology.
[EMBED: https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/1392552701515370496]
While the Notes app might have been more than enough for celebs to qualify their bad behavior in 2019, Chrissy realized she (or perhaps her followers) needed more. So she wrote an entire Medium essay for her fans and haters to devour—and posted a carousel of screenshots to her feed so her words could be read in entirety, without even having to leave IG. Her words wavered from remorseful to joking, sort of self aware to totally out of touch and nearly every emotion in-between. Though, at the end of the day, she did take full responsibility for her actions. “I was a troll, full stop. And I am so sorry,” one line in her essay reads. And with such a performance, it comes as little surprise that the post garnered over 1.32 million likes. Although this saga doesn’t end there—and it has yet to be revealed if Chrissy will actually return to glory as an easily likeable celeb.
Not long after that lengthy and regret-stained explanation went public, fashion designer and Project Runway alum Michael Costello emerged from the depths of the web to claim that Chrissy and her team tried to ruin his career. He claimed he was left suicidal and depressed in 2014 after she accused him of being racist on Instagram after seeing a falsely photoshopped image. Even though he reached out to try to clarify the situation, Chrissy still threatened him with ruining his career along with DMs that he claimed said things along the lines of: “Racist people like you deserve to suffer and die.”
What, you might be wondering, did Chrissy do next? Well, she tried out a new version of the Insta-apology. This time, bringing in the big guns and making it a “Statement on Behalf of Chrissy Teigen,” alluding to the fact that her team (like her lawyer, her manager and her agent) crafted this note.
[EMBED: https://www.instagram.com/p/CQRk4Agh6QQ/]
“Chrissy is completely surprised and disappointed by Michael Costello’s recent attack, which includes fictional “screenshots” from 2014 of supposed private messages that Chrissy did not send,” said the statement. While not quite an apology but certainly a public deflection, this post merely racked up a little over 496,000 likes. Devoid of the oversharing quality that we’ve come to expect from Chrissy—along with her signature sense of humor—this Insta-apology (if you can call it that) felt manufactured and fake.
But it was only after this post went up that Chrissy resumed her normal social media patterns. Within two days she was back to posting pictures of John Legend with their kids, documenting their lavish vacations across Italy and, of course, throwing in a few drool-worthy snaps of her cooking. And despite going on the record to say that she’s in “cancel club” and that she might be there “forever,” one thing is clear: Chrissy Teigen probably isn’t going anywhere. She will simply continue living her life very online. Just don’t be surprised if she makes a few more Insta-apologies along the way.
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