Alison Roman: I’m Sorry for Dissing Chrissy Teigen, Marie Kondo to ‘Distinguish Myself’

Food writer Alison Roman on Monday “formally” apologized to Chrissy Teigen and home organizing expert Marie Kondo after she attacked them over their business strategies in a recent interview, admitting that she “used their names disparagingly to try and distinguish myself.” 

“I need to formally apologize to Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo,” Roman wrote in an Instagram post, “It was stupid, careless and insensitive. I need to learn, and respect, the difference between being unfiltered and honest vs. being uneducated and flippant. The burden is not on them (or anyone else) to teach me, and I’m deeply sorry that my learning came at Chrissy and Marie’s expense. They’ve worked extremely hard to get where they are and both deserve better than my tone deaf remarks.” 

Roman, a Brooklyn-based food writer for The New York Times and the author of cookbook Nothing Fancy, sparked social media outrage on Friday after her interview with The New Consumer came to light.

“Like, what Chrissy Teigen has done is so crazy to me,” Roman, 34, said in the interview. 

“She had a successful cookbook,” she continued, “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, who authored the cookbook Cravings and started a website that shares the same name, took to Twitter to express her dismay after hearing Roman’s remarks, saying that “this is a huge bummer and hit me hard,” adding, “I started Cravings because I wanted something for myself.” 

Roman first issued a non-apology, asserting that “when women bully other women for being honest about money and how much they do or do not make, well, that’s amore.” She later publicly apologized to Teigen for her “flippant” and “careless” remarks after a Twitter uproar ensued. 

Over the weekend, Teigen announced she was taking a break from social media, saying some users had attacked her kids over the spat.

On Monday, Roman elaborated further on why she decided to take a public swipe at the two popular public figures. “Among the many uncomfortable things I’ve begun processing is the knowledge that my comments were rooted in my own insecurity,” she wrote.

Many have pointed out that Roman, a white woman, chose to publicly bash two women of color, which the columnist confronted in her statement.

“I’m a white woman who has and will continue to benefit from white privilege and I recognize that makes what I said even more inexcusable and hurtful,” Roman said. “The fact that it didn’t occur to me that I had singled out two Asian women is one hundred percent a function of my privilege.”