“Emilia Pérez” star, Karla Sofía Gascón, has issued an apology in the wake of considerable backlash surrounding the actress’ resurfaced social media posts in which she condemned Islam and called the late George Floyd “a drug addict” and a “swindler.”
In a statement via Netflix, Gascón writes, “I want to acknowledge the conversation around my past social media posts that have caused hurt. As someone in a marginalized community, I know this suffering all too well and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain. All my life I have fought for a better world. I believe light will always triumph over darkness.”
The Spanish actress recently became the first transgender person nominated for an Oscar, with the crime musical, “Emilia Pérez,” snagging 13 nominations at the Academy Awards. The film has been on a winning streak after it took home the award for Best Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes earlier in January.
Gascón has been mired in controversy since early Thursday after journalist Sarah Hagi unearthed Gascón’s old tweets from 2016 to 2021. Gascón’s posts have since been wiped but Hagi’s thread, which has been viewed three million times, highlights numerous posts from the actress berating Muslims for their faith, language and culture, claiming the faith should be banned.
In one of Gascón’s posts from 2020, she wrote, “I’m sorry, Is it just my impression or is there more Muslims in Spain? Every time I go to pick up my daughter from school there are more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their heels. Next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.”
During the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, Gascón wrote, “I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys without rights and consider policemen to be assassins. They’re all wrong.”
In a post from 2021, Gascón criticized the Oscars for awarding “Nomadland” Best Picture.
“More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films, I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M,” Gascón wrote. “Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.”
After Gascón’s apology on Thursday, the actress issued another statement to explain her decision to deactivate her X account, stating she believes “there is something very dark” behind what she views as an attempt to “sink” her chance at an Oscar.
Gascón writes, “I’m sorry, but I can no longer allow this campaign of hate and misinformation to affect me and my family, so at their request I am closing my account on X.”
“I have been threatened with death, insulted, abused and harassed to the point of exhaustion,” she writes.
The actress explains, “I have defended each and every one of the minorities in this world and supported any event against racism, freedom of religion or homophobia, in the same way that I have criticized the hypocrisy that underlies them, because the first thing I am self-critical of is myself.”
The Best Actress race encountered earlier controversy involving Gascón when she claimed in a Brazilian interview that fellow Best Actress nominee, “I’m Still Here” star Fernanda Torres, allegedly used online tactics to smear her and “Emilia Pérez.”
“What I don’t like are social media teams — people who work with these people — trying to diminish our work, like me and my movie, because that doesn’t lead anywhere,” Gascón said. “You don’t need to tear down someone’s work to highlight another’s. I have never, at any point, said anything bad about Fernanda Torres or her movie. However, there are people working with Fernanda Torres tearing me and ‘Emilia Pérez’ down. That speaks more about their movie than mine.”
Gascón clarified to Variety that her comments were not “directly associated” with Torres, but were aimed at “toxicity and violent hate speech on social media.”
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