On Monday, December 21, Heather Morris apologized for a series of tweets, which she later deleted, about Mark Salling, a Glee co-star who committed suicide in 2018 after he was found guilty of possessing over 50,000 media files on child pornography. Morris apologized to people who have had similar experiences and felt “triggered” by her December 18 tweets. Her apology is coming after she received a lot of criticism for her previous tweets about Salling, HuffPost reports.
On Monday, December 7, a Twitter user had posted a series of pictures from the hit TV series to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 10th episode of the second season of Glee “A Very Glee Christmas”. In one of the pictures, the user covered Salling’s head with a vomiting emoji. Morris quoted the tweet, last Friday, stating that covering Salling’s head with the “vomit face is offensive”. Twitter users immediately criticized her reply.
Some of the users stated that for his crimes, nothing used to describe Salling should be seen as offensive to anyone. The users reminded Morris about the extent of Salling’s crimes, stating that some of the victims of child pornography that were found on Salling’s phone and drive were as young as three years old. Morris had tweeted another reply which was viewed as an effort to defend Salling’s actions.
“It is absolutely useless to defend certain things because some things are just better left unsaid,” Morris stated in a reply. “I know you all have opinions about what he did, I really understand that you do. I know some things are just unforgivable. But the events of this year have made this holiday season so difficult for many of us.”
In another tweet, Morris mentioned two other Glee casts who had died – Cory Monteith, who died of alcohol and drug overdose in 2013, and Naya Rivera, who drowned in an accident in July 2020. Morris stated that the Glee family has lost three members, including Salling, and not just two as people were stating. The actress stated that Salling’s actions cannot be in any way justified. She attributed his actions to a sickness, citing pedophilia as a sickness, a statement which did not sit well with most of her fans, Buzzfeed writes.
“We lost 3 cast members and not 2,” Morris’s now-deleted tweet stated. “It is very difficult to act as if the 3rd person is invisible because even if we can’t justify his actions, he was still a part of the family. At a point, he had a mental illness, yes, pedophilia is an illness.”
She ended the tweet by “thanking” people for disrespecting her and being unkind to her at a time when it was difficult for her to stop crying over the loss of the “entire Glee family”. The backlash from all the tweets led to Monday’s apology. Users condemned Morris for trying to defend Salling and for putting Rivera and Monteith in the same box as the later actor. Morris tendered a heartfelt apology and deleted all the tweets.
The 33-year-old actress stated that she realized that her tweets must have been offensive to people who were abused as children and those who had family members that have gone through a similar experience.
Source: huffpost.com
