Ever since the police killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests in support of Black and Indigenous lives, more people in the public eye are being held accountable for their past and present racist actions and words.
On Wednesday, Elaine “Lainey” Lui, the Lainey Gossip blogger and eTalk anchor sat down with her “The Social” co-hosts to apologize for racist and homophobic blog posts she wrote in the 2000s.
“Those posts were racist, they were misogynistic, they were homophobic, they were transphobic, they were ugly, they were shameful,” Lui said, referring to said posts. “I am so sorry.”
“The Lainey Gossip website has evolved in that time and I have addressed and apologized over the years for these sins however accountability is not temporary, it’s ongoing, so I’m here today to be accountable,” she continued.
Lui also explained how she came to rationalize posting those hurtful blog posts back in the years around 2006, admitting that her early success in a toxic celebrity culture made her want to keep posting the same content so she’d be popular.
On Monday, Lui posted a lengthy apology on her blog, acknowledging that her past posts were racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.
“I have been conditioned in white supremacy, and I have enabled white privilege, even as a person of colour myself, because we too, given that white supremacy is so dominant, can have bias,” Lui, who is Chinese Canadian, wrote.
“Those posts were racist, they were misogynistic, they were homophobic, they were transphobic, they were ugly, they were shameful. I am so sorry.”
- Elaine Lui
“When I started this site back in 2003/2004, I wrote misogynist things and slut shaming things, and racist things. And as the site grew in popularity, it served as confirmation bias, that there was an appetite out there for this kind of content, and I wanted to keep delivering it.”
However, Lui says that since then, she “learned and grew” by calling out her past problematic posts and “mistakes,” talking about the progress she’s made when it comes to understanding her own bias, hiring more writers of colour and from the LGBTQ community, and holding herself accountable by not deleting these posts.
“Those old posts sit on the site to show people who I was, how ugly that was, and to also show that over time I grew and I would address those old posts in the growing, point to them consistently and say, “Hey, this is what I was, look at me, and here I am, this is what I’m trying to do,” she said on “The Social.”
In her apology post, she also address the problems with the specific posts, and tells the reader it’s up to them whether to decide whether to keep reading her blog.
Lui’s apology comes on the heels of her name trending on Twitter earlier this week after users posted screengrabs of her old blog posts.
The tweets came after Lui’s eTalk co-anchor Ben Mulroney stepped down from his role to “create space” for people of colour after his wife, Jessica Mulroney, was let go from numerous engagements for bullying Sasha Exeter, a Black influencer based in Toronto.
Lui had her own take on Mulroney’s threats to Exeter, writing on her blog that Mulroney used her white privilege to silence her.
“Over and over again, Jessica Mulroney demonstrated her white privilege. Sasha Exeter called her out, and in response she threatened her. Sasha went public and she flexed her Meghan Markle friendship, half-assed her apology, and then, once again, threatened her with a ‘liable (sic) suit.’ Wrong and strong is terrifying. White privilege is terrifying – it terrified Sasha and it terrifies so many others. Still.”
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