After years of regaling her 13.7 million followers with images of her cooking, children and an endless stream of sometimes silly, sometimes serious thoughts on the news of the day, Chrissy Teigen announced on Wednesday (March 24) that she is leaving the service.
The model and TV host posted a lengthy statement on Instagram the next day about her decision to abandon the service where she and husband John Legend were known for playfully sparring with each other, as well as for their lauded openness in sharing the difficulty of losing their child last year after Teigen’s pregnancy complications.
“It’s true! The platform no longer serves me as positively as it does negatively, so with that I bid you adieu,” Teigen wrote. “But I want to say that this is absolutely NOT twitter’s fault – I believe they do all they can to combat relentless bullying, any honestly, it’s not the bullying!! You guys have no idea how much they’ve reached out and worked with my team and me personally.”
Teigen — an active Twitter user for over a decade who had taken occasional breaks from posting and made her account private last May — emphasized that it was absolutely not the service’s fault that she was leaving. Nor was it the ceaseless bullying or trolling she faced in the form of hundreds and thousands of attacks on her posts that took personal, vicious aim at even her most innocuous musings, that inspired her exit.
“The trolls I can deal with, although it weighs on you,” she said. “It’s just me. I have to come to terms with the fact some people aren’t gonna like me. I hate letting people down or upsetting people and I feel like I just did it over and over and over. Someone can’t read that they disappointed you in some way every single day, all day without physically absorbing that energy. I can feel it in my bones.”
And in classic Teigen style, she ended her kiss-off with a shout out to the followers of the Q Anon conspiracy theory who had apparently decided that she was not living in her Hollywood home with Legend and their children, but was in fact locked up at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, “lol. I saw Q: into the storm and saw what I’m working with here. And I, lol, I no longer care. Don’t flatter yourselves.”
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She got plenty of support (as well as the predictable river of hateful applause from detractors) after her announcement, including from Randy Rainbow, who tweeted, “Applauding Chrissy Teigen’s decision to step away. Twitter is a magical land full of opportunities for which I’m grateful, but I know firsthand the very real toll it can take on one’s mental health. I hope this sparks new conversation/perspectives that lead to positive change.”
At press time, it did not appear that Legend had responded to Teigen’s statement.