If you were expecting a Straight Up apology from former Vanderpump Rules star Stassi Schroeder, this, well, is... something like that.
Schroeder went on the The Tamron Hall Show on September 17 and spoke out for the first time since she was notoriously fired from the Bravo reality show after eight seasons.
“People expected me to just understand everything immediately and things like that take time. And I felt like it would be better for me to take the time to get a greater understanding of everything and the issues before I opened my mouth again,” Schroeder said. “I’m someone who messed up quite a few times. I am the reason why I am in this situation. I think a lot of people wanted me to focus on cancel culture and whether I was a victim or not but it’s not how I feel at all.”
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The 32-year-old TV personality, who has been a Vanderpump Rules mainstay since its debut in 2013, was ousted from the show on June 9 after a series of her racially insensitive remarks and actions surfaced amid the Black Lives Matter protests. One of these incidents occurred in a since deleted 2017 episode of her Straight Up With Stassi podcast, when she complained about the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, saying "whenever [Black people] get upset everyone has to go above and beyond to then make them happy."
A few days after network cut ties with Schroeder, Faith Stowers, a Black former employee at Lisa Vanderpump's restaurant, SUR, revealed Schroeder and fellow Vanderpump star Kristen Doute reported her to the police for theft (a crime she didn’t commit) in 2018. The two hoped to seek revenge for Stowers' cheating scandal with Jax Taylor. Schroeder and Doute both publicly apologized to Stowers on June 7, but Doute was also fired. Newcomers to the show Max Boyens and Brett Caprioni were also ousted for using racial slurs in their old tweets.
Schroeder expressed to Hall that her "biggest worry" is people thinking she's racist. "Just going out to a restaurant and going to grocery store and wondering if that’s what people think. … I don’t have hate in my heart. But I recognize that I wasn’t anti-racist. That’s something I’ve been learning throughout all of this,” she said.
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However, she said she's working with a diversity coach to become a "better" person and to recognize her white privilege. "I’ve spent the last three months working with a teacher and learning so much that I didn’t know. I didn’t understand that just because something wasn’t about race for me, doesn’t mean it’s not about race for the other person," she said.
"I have spent my life as a privileged person," Schroeder continued. "It is my fault, I have to say this, that I had not educated myself before. It’s my fault that I didn’t know better."
Schroeder, who revealed after he firing in late June that she's expecting her first child with her fiancé Beau Clark, wants to "make sure people from different cultures, ethnicities and backgrounds are part of her life."
A majority of the criticism of Schroeder stems from her past ethos of being "really sick of everyone making everything about race," but she has now confirmed to Hall that she supports the Black Lives Matter Movement. "Black people are dying. Because they’ve been oppressed for 400 years. All lives can’t matter until Black Lives Matter. I’ve realized, in doing classes."
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