The Bachelorette Australia 2016‘s Georgia Love has apologised nearly two years after posting a controversial Instagram Story about a Chinese restaurant.
Back in September 2021, the 34-year-old shared a photo of a cat in a restaurant window, questioning whether the feline was the “shop attendant or lunch”.
This sparked backlash en masse, with fans criticising the reality star’s “casual racism”.
Now, Georgia has directly addressed the scandal, noting that she’s “learnt a lot” in the time since.
In an interview with Stellar Magazine, the journalist said she never intended to “purposely upset or offend anyone” with her words.
She added that she is “deeply sorry” for the upset it caused.
“I’ve done a lot of reflection. I’ve learnt a lot,” she confessed.
Georgia also touched on her experience of being on the wrong end of “cancel culture”.
“I hate the term cancellation,” she admitted. “To think that we have the ability to cancel somebody — whether that means from their industry, their job, their family and friends. We don’t have the ability to do that.”
The Bachelorette‘s Georgia Love addresses impact of losing on-air reporter job
Amid the backlash, Georgia was removed from her on-air reporter gig at Channel Seven, which she dubbed her “dream job”.
“I felt so lucky every day to be doing what I loved and what I had dreamed of for so long,” she explained.
“So to have lost that on-air job — I stayed working at Seven, but I was taken off air in the fallout — was probably the hardest thing for me, because I’ve always put a lot of emphasis and focus on my work and my career.”
Georgia’s latest Stellar interview comes after she spoke to the publication in April 2022.
At the time, she spoke about how she was impacted by the public’s criticism of her.
“People need to be kinder. And that includes me,” she said. “Reading anonymous people’s nasty words wasn’t going to help anything.”
The Bachelorette alum voiced that people “should be able to say sorry, show they are sorry, and move on”.
“The way the world is at the moment isn’t allowing that to happen.”
At the time, she and her husband, Lee Elliot, were also facing backlash for their involvement in a sponsored influencer trip to Saudi Arabia.
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