1.
Paris Hilton has a long history of using slurs, many of which were exposed in 2007 after many of Paris’ personal belongings from a storage unit were revealed. In one video, dancing with her sister Nicky Hilton to a song by the Notorious B.I.G., Paris said, “We’re like two [n-word].” She also used the f-slur and made antisemitic comments.
2.
Blake Lively gave an interview in 2008 where she joked about “look[ing] like a tranny.” Here’s the quote: “People think I’m goofy. I don’t have that whole Angelina Jolie air to me. I wish that I did, and that’s an insecurity of mine. Some days, I wake up, and I’m like ‘Oh, I look good today!’ And some days, I wake up and feel like I look like a tranny.”
3.
Megan Fox has had several infamous interview quotes over the years, particularly her comparison of Transformers director Michael Bay to Hitler, but I feel like we forget the other quotes from that same 2009 Wonderland interview. In one, she basically called Elizabeth Taylor a “schizoid,” saying: “I do have a fear of ending up like Elizabeth Taylor in the sense that I will have been married eight times and this senile insane borderline personality schizoid when I’m 80, still drawing on my eyebrows.”
4.
Fox also said in another interview, “I would never date a girl who was bisexual, because that means they also sleep with men, and men are so dirty that I’d never want to sleep with a girl who had slept with a man.”
5.
John Mayer is no stranger to controversy, but perhaps one of his most controversial interviews that often gets forgotten today is the 2010 interview where he used the n-word and called his penis a white supremacist. When the interviewer asked, “Do Black women throw themselves at you?” Mayer replied, “I don’t think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.”
6.
British Comedian Zoe Lyons made a really awful joke about Amy Winehouse back in 2008: “I can’t believe Amy Winehouse self-harms. She’s so irritating she must be able to find someone to do it for her.” The joke actually won at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
7.
An attendee of one of Tracy Morgan’s stand-up shows in 2011 claimed that Morgan had gone on a rant against gay people, saying being gay was a “choice” and that anti-gay bullying was “insignificant” and not worth complaining about. Most horrifically, the attendee claimed Morgan said that if his son were gay “he better come home and talk to him like a man and not [he mimicked a gay, high pitched voice] or he would pull out a knife and stab that little N (one word I refuse to use) to death. … Tracy then said he didn’t f–king care if he pissed off some gays, because if they can take a f–king d-ck up their a–… they can take a f–king joke.”
8.
Another Tracy Morgan comment from 2011 was, “Let me tell you something about Sarah Palin, she’s good masturbation material.”
9.
Kevin Hart similarly spoke in 2010 about what he would do if his son was gay in a stand-up routine, revealing that another boy was “grinding” on his son at a birthday party, and he “knocked them both down,” and when he was reprimanded, he said “you show me another kid getting fucked in the ass and I’ll calm down.”
10.
He also tweeted in 2011 about how he would call his son “gay” if he tried to play with a dollhouse, as well as break it over his son’s head — along with a few other tweets that made light of gay people and issues.
11.
One more tweet — in 2013, Steve Martin tweeted, asking fans to send in grammar questions. “Is this how you spell lasonia?” someone asked, and Martin replied, “It depends. Are you in an African-American neighborhood or at an Italian restaurant.”
12.
In 2008, Madonna indirectly called her soon-to-be ex-husband Guy Ritchie “emotionally retarded” at a concert when she said, “This song is for the emotionally retarded. Maybe you know some people who fall in that category. I know I do.”
13.
In 2009, after the divorce was finalized, Ritchie said of Madonna, “I still love her. But she’s retarded, too.”
14.
Madonna has made a number of other problematic comments, including fatphobic comments about “obsessive” fans. “It’s always fat people too,” she says of these types of fans. “They are the most unattractive social outcasts, like really overweight girls or guys with lots of acne that follow me around and pester me. It’s frightening because not only are they bothering me, but they’re horrible to look at, too.”
15.
She’s also made remarks disparaging Black men. She once told Spin Magazine, “I’ve always in this naive way identified with other minorities because I’m in a minority. You think that somehow unifies you in some philosophical way. But ultimately it doesn’t. Because I’ve found that being a strong female is actually more frightening to the Black men that I’ve dated. It took me a really long time to accept that. … I believe that I have never been treated more disrespectfully as a woman than by the Black men that I’ve dated. I’ve never actually said that to anybody, but it’s true and I think it’s a cultural thing.”
She continued to say it wouldn’t be the same if she was a Black woman. “I think Black men have just been shit on for so long, that, in a way, Black women are maybe more willing to accept rage from a Black man, because they see what’s happened to them. So many Black men grow up without fathers, without strong male figures, without a sense of romance and seeing a man treat a woman with respect.”
16.
More recently, in 2015, she talked about how “Women are still the most marginalized group” and that “it’s moved along for the gay community, for the African-American community, but women are still just trading on their ass.” Also in 2015, she said that ageism is “still the one area where you can totally discriminate against somebody and talk shit. Because of their age. Only females, though. Not males. So in that respect, we still live in a very sexist society. No one would dare to say a degrading remark about being black or dare to say a degrading remark on Instagram about someone being gay. But my age — anybody and everybody would say something degrading to me.”
17.
Borat was all the rage back in 2005, leading MTV to tap Sacha Baron Cohen to host the Europe Music Awards in-character. This led to a bunch of wild quotes from Cohen, calling the Pussy Cat Dolls “international singing prostitutes.” He also offered to sell a baby to Madonna, saying, “My only concern is that this singing transvestite will not be such a good father,” at another point calling her a “genuine transvestite.”
18.
Olivia Munn has made some fatphobic comments, including writing in her 2010 memoir, “I will fix America’s obesity problems by taking all motorized transport away from fat people. In turn, I will build an infrastructure of Fat Tunnels, where all the fat people can walk. This will create jobs and subsequent weight loss.”
19.
Also in 2010, Munn joked, “See, I date different guys of different religions and races so I can always make the joke. I date the Blacks, I date the Mexicans. I date ’em all for comedy. You can’t buy that kind of gold. Having sex with a guy once is worth it.”
20.
Chelsea Handler has made a number of racist digs at Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s children, including, after the divorce, “I wonder why he [Pitt] needed to self-medicate. Maybe because he could have been spending the last 12 years at Lake Como hanging out with George Clooney and Matt Damon instead of being stuck in a house with 85 kids speaking 15 different languages. Oh yeah, because he married a f***ing lunatic, that’s why.”
22.
In her book Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, she wrote of Maddox, “I rolled over and picked an Us Weekly magazine off the floor. The cover had a picture of Angelina, Brad, and their little Eskimo son, Maddox. I sat staring at the photo, wondering why this little guy looks so pissed off in every picture. At first I thought he was just pissed about his mohawk, but then I realized he’s probably furious.”
“Maddox must have thought he hit the jackpot when some A-list celebrity rescued him from third-world Cambodia, only to discover that she was going to shuffle him back and forth to every other third-world country in the universe. He’s probably like, ‘When the fuck are we gonna get to Malibu, bitch?””
23.
Handler had actually made this joke before, while making a racist remark about Madonna’s adopted child. In 2006, when Handler was asked about reports Madonna had adopted a one-year-old from Africa (her son David), she replied, “You know, actually, the important thing to remember, Joe, is that the baby technically—whether she raises it in London or the States, technically the baby is African-American. So my question would be: Do you think he‘ll talk loud in movie theaters?” She then added, “I really hope this baby doesn‘t turn out like Angelina Jolie‘s, you know, and Brad Pitt‘s little Eskimo, Maddox,” and then telling the same joke about Maddox and Malibu.
24.
Handler also was accused of racism concerning her book about her trip to Africa, Uganda Be Kidding Me. In the comedy adaptations of the book, she said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I went to Uganda? I’ve always wanted to know where rappers come from.” She had previously used a tweet congratulating Lupita Nyong’o on her Oscar win for 12 Years a Slave to promote the book (with no apparent connection besides Lupita’s African heritage — which, by the way, is not Ugandan). Speaking of Nyong’o — during the same Oscars ceremony, she also joked that Angelina Jolie was filing papers to adopt Nyong’o.
25.
She’s also made anti-trans comments. She wrote in her book Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, “I would rather sit next to a transgender person and discuss why every single one I’ve met smells like a bar in the daytime than listen to people tell me why I want to have children and that I just don’t know it yet.” This random dig about trans people was not even relevant in the context of the story she was telling. Handler also misgendered and joked about Chaz Bono.
26.
Back in 2003, there was a “feud” between Kelly Osbourne and Christina Aguilera, with Osbourne saying of Aguilera: “She’s one of the most disgusting human beings in the world” and “I’ve seen drag queens who look better,” as well as calling her a “cow.”
27.
Later, in 2011, Osbourne spoke about Aguilera gaining weight. “Maybe she is just becoming the fat bitch she was born to be. I don’t know. She was a c**t to me. …She called me fat for so many f***ing years, so you know what? F**k you! You’re fat too.”
28.
And finally, in 2012, Emily Blunt made a fat-phobic comment she has since apologized for after the clip resurfaced. In the clip, she told a story on The Jonathan Ross Show about going to Chili’s while filming Looper in the US. Ross, the host, joked about Americans being “enormous,” and Blunt laughed and replied, “Well, the girl who was serving me was enormous.”
What wild and problematic forgotten celebrity comments do you remember? Let us know in the comments.
