Last month, Jamie Lee Curtis sparked widespread backlash for her emotional comments on the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Charlie, 31, was fatally shot on Sept. 10 at a speaking event for Utah Valley University. Shortly after, Jamie opened up about his death on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, saying that while she disagreed with many of his beliefs, she still hoped he felt comfort in his final moments.
“I’m going to bring something up with you just because it’s front of mind,” she told Marc, later beginning to cry. “I disagreed with him on almost every point I ever heard him say, but I believe he was a man of faith, and I hope in that moment when he died, that he felt connected with his faith.”
“Even though his ideas were abhorrent to me,” Jamie said through tears, “I still believe he’s a father and a husband and a man of faith. And I hope whatever connection to God means that he felt it.”
Jamie’s comments were widely criticized online, with many readers struggling to empathize due to what they said was a history of “hateful” and “shitty behavior” from Charlie, including on topics like gun control, LGBTQ+ issues, and race.
In a new interview with Variety, Jamie responded to the criticism and said her comments were “mistranslated.”
“An excerpt of it mistranslated what I was saying as I wished him well, like I was talking about him in a very positive way,” she said, “which I wasn’t. I was simply talking about his faith in God.”
“And so it was a mistranslation,” Jamie continued, “which is a pun, but not. In the binary world today, you cannot hold two ideas at the same time: I cannot be Jewish and totally believe in Israel’s right to exist and at the same time reject the destruction of Gaza. You can’t say that, because you get vilified for having a mind that says, ‘I can hold both those thoughts. I can be contradictory in that way.'”
When the interviewer suggested that public figures need to be “careful” about what they say, Jamie reportedly “glare[d]” at him and replied, “I don’t have to be careful. If I was careful, I wouldn’t have told you any of what I just told you. I would have just said, ‘Hi, welcome. I baked you banana bread. Here’s my dog. Here’s my house, blah, blah, blah. What do you want to know?’ I can’t not be who I am in the moment I am.”
You can read the full interview here — then let me know your thoughts in the comments.
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