Chrissy Teigen has broken her monthlong social media silence to apologize for trolling and bullying young women on Twitter in the past.
In a Medium post published Monday, Teigen wrote, "I was a troll, full stop. And I am so sorry."
Teigen, a model turned cookbook author and social media celebrity, stopped tweeting and Instagramming last month, after TV personality Courtney Stodden recently accused Teigen of harassing and bullying them on Twitter around 10 years ago.
Stodden, who is nonbinary, resurfaced old tweets and DMs from Teigen in which she told the then-16-year-old to kill themself and called them names.
Stodden, who was cruelly mocked and slut-shamed by the public and media when they married 50-year-old actor Doug Hutchison as a teenager in 2011, said in interviews and on social media that Teigen would "privately DM me and tell me to kill myself. Things like, 'I can’t wait for you to die.'"
"She has sent me so many different tweets," Stodden said. "Private DMs, up 'til a couple years ago. It's so damaging when you have someone like Chrissy Teigen bullying children."
In a series of tweets on May 12, Teigen apologized to Stodden, saying, "I'm mortified and sad at who I used to be. I was an insecure, attention seeking troll."
She remained silent until her Medium post on Monday, which expanded on her Twitter apology and acknowledged that her past attention-seeking social media behavior was cruel and immature.
"There is simply no excuse for my past horrible tweets," Teigen wrote. "My targets didn’t deserve them. No one does. Many of them needed empathy, kindness, understanding and support, not my meanness masquerading as a kind of casual, edgy humor. I was a troll, full stop. And I am so sorry."
Teigen said she was in the process of privately reaching out to people she had insulted in the past. She said she first started using social media to "snark at some celebrities."
"If there was a pop culture pile-on, I took to Twitter to try to gain attention and show off what I at the time believed was a crude, clever, harmless quip. I thought it made me cool and relatable if I poked fun at celebrities," she wrote.
"In reality, I was insecure, immature and in a world where I thought I needed to impress strangers to be accepted," Teigen said, adding that she now cringes when confronted with her past words.
"I wasn’t just attacking some random avatar, but hurting young women — some who were still girls — who had feelings. How could I not stop and think of that?" she said.
Teigen said she was not seeking sympathy and there was no justification for her behavior.
"I'm not a victim here," she said, but added that she was "no longer the person who wrote those horrible things" after getting married, having kids, and attending therapy.
She said she was going to take more time to focus on her family and herself.
"We are all more than our worst moments," Teigen wrote. "I won’t ask for your forgiveness, only your patience and tolerance. I ask that you allow me, as I promise to allow you, to own past mistakes and be given the opportunity to seek self improvement and change."