The fallout of food critic Alison Roman’s brutal criticism of Chrissy Teigen and her business strategies has spurred hateful attacks from social media users on Teigen’s children, prompting Teigen on Sunday to announce that she’s taking “a little break.”
“I really hate what this drama has caused this week,” Teigen wrote in a Twitter post. “Calling my kids Petri dish babies or making up flight manifests with my name on them to ‘Epstein island,’ to justify someone else’s disdain with me seems gross to me so I’m gonna take a little break,” she continued.
Teigen revealed in 2018 that she conceived her two children, Luna and Miles, at the same time via in vitro fertilization. “They were sharing the same little petri dish together. It’s crazy,” Teigen told People magazine at the time. She added that “it’d be awesome” to conceive naturally, which she said has “never happened” to her.
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Teigen, who is married to singer John Legend and created a cooking empire that shares the name of her book Cravings, also cited a “gross” insult directed at her in reference to “Epstein Island,” which was billionaire financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s private Caribbean island.
“This is what always happens,” Teigen continued. “The first day, a ton of support, then the next, 1 million reasons as to why you deserved this. It never fails.”
Teigen did not specify what she meant by taking a break or what it applies to.
However, shortly after the tweet was published, she made her Twitter account private. It wasn’t the first time the celebrity personality locked her accounts. “I just feel like I am absorbing bad shit 24/7,” Teigen tweeted to her followers in 2016. “My body and mind cannot handle it anymore.”
She did it again a year later after a Twitter user shared a conspiracy theory claiming that Teigen and her husband were linked to a pedophile ring. “I’m pretty disturbed over here,” Teigen said on Twitter at the time.
Roman, a food critic for The New York Times and author of the Nothing Fancy cookbook, incited a Twitter uproar on Friday after her recent interview with The New Consumer went viral. The cooking maven faced backlash after she took the interview as an opportunity to publicly swipe at home organizing expert Marie Kondo and criticize Teigen’s Cravings website as a “content farm,” which “horrifies” her.
“Like, what Chrissy Teigen has done is so crazy to me,” said Roman, 34, in the interview. “She had a successful cookbook. And then it was like: Boom, line at Target. Boom, now she has an Instagram page that has over a million followers where it’s just, like, people running a content farm for her. That horrifies me and it’s not something that I ever want to do. I don’t aspire to that. But like, who’s laughing now? Because she’s making a ton of (expletive) money.”
Teigen responded to Roman’s words on Twitter, saying “this is a huge bummer and hit me hard,” adding, “I started Cravings because I wanted something for myself. I wanted something John didn't buy, I wanted something to do that calmed me, made me happy and made others happy, too. Cravings isn’t a ‘machine’ or ‘farmed content’—it’s me and 2 other women.”
Roman initially doubled down on her comments in the interview, unapologetically saying that “when women bully other women for being honest about money and how much they do or do not make, well, that's amore.”
Roman later sought to “clarify” what she said: “I am not coming for anyone who's successful, especially not women.” She eventually issued a public apology to Teigen, calling her comments “flippant” and “careless.”
In a statement, Cherry Bombe magazine, which celebrates women in the food industry, said: “Women calling other women sell-outs and bitches for their hard-earned accomplishments is not acceptable. White women calling women of color sell-outs and bitches for their hard-earned accomplishments is not acceptable.”
