Best get comfortable because the Glee racism scandal just keeps getting worse for Lea Michele. After Samantha Ware spilled the tea on Twitter about how awful Lea Michele was to her while on Glee, this opened the floodgates for other castmates to join in on the dogpile, which led to a cliched non-apology from Lea.
Now Samantha has gone into detail about her experience on Glee and it seems like what’s been revealed of Lea Michele’s awfulness is just the tip of a horrible iceberg.
The GOAT team dive right into this whole Samantha Ware/Lea Michele/Twitter/racism/’Glee’ drama on ‘It’s Been A Big Day For…’ below:
Chatting to Variety about her experience working on Glee with Lea Michele, Samantha Ware says she “knew from day one” that her co-star didn’t “like me,” how “the silent treatment, the stare-downs, the looks, the comments under her breath, the weird passive aggressiveness” all started after her first performance, and how it “built up” from there.
Samantha recalls how Lea publicly humiliated and threatened her job in front of a large crowd of cast, crew and extras by calling in Ryan Murphy to “fire” her, but didn’t report it at the time because Lea’s diva behaviour as “nothing new” and her case “didn’t seem that big of a deal.”
When Samantha did speak up, “they just shrugged it off, like ‘that’s her'” and the lack of action ultimately helped “perpetuate this abuse” on the Glee set.
After talking to Lea about the aforementioned public humiliation incident, Samantha recalls being told to “shut my mouth,” reminded how she didn’t “deserve to have that job” and how Lea is supposedly the big dog around the Glee set.
As for the now-infamous “I’m going to shit in your wig” comment, Samantha says that happened because she had laughed while watching a scene involving Lea, who didn’t take it too well.
When Samantha confided in her colleagues and peers about all this, “everyone minded their business or said, ‘I’m sorry, I wish I had the power to stop this, but this is just the way it is, and this is just hot it’s been’.”
After hearing this first-hand account, no wonder why Samantha Ware held nothing back on Lea Michele with her Twitter post.
Talking about the intense backlash and accusations of racism directed at Lea Michelle after her bombshell tweet, Samantha she looks at it as a learning opportunity about Black Lives Matter, saying “it shouldn’t have to take my tweet. When you tweet, ‘Black lives matter,’ that would mean you have an understanding of what that hashtag means, but it’s clear that it doesn’t.”
As for whether Lea contacted her after all this went down, Samantha says her Glee co-star sent her a personal apology email on June 3 but also notes how her non-apology is proof she hasn’t learned anything. However, Samantha doesn’t call Lea a racist but just another white person who is blind to how the colour of their skin has given them a leg up in the industry.
“Does Lea even know what a microaggression is? I don’t know. All that her apology did was affirm that she hasn’t learned anything. Am I calling Lea a racist? No. Does Lea have racist tendencies? I think Lea suffers from a symptom of living in this world in an industry that is tailored to white people.”
Samantha Ware’s entire first-hand account of her experience with Lea Michelle on Glee is pretty intense stuff and you should definitely read it all here.
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