Jamie Lee Curtis has spoken out about the backlash she received after getting emotional over Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September.
“That excerpt mistranslated what I said to wish him well. It seemed as if I was talking about him in a very positive way, which I wasn’t. I was simply talking about his faith in God,” the “Freaky Friday” actress said in a new interview with Variety.
“I mean, it’s a mistranslation and it’s a pun, but it’s not. In today’s binary world, you can’t hold two ideas at the same time,” she argued.
“I’m not a Jew, and I can’t fully believe in Israel’s right to exist and at the same time reject the destruction of Gaza. I can’t say that because I would be accused of having a mindset that says, ‘I can have both ideas. I can be contradictory in that way.'”
Mr Curtis, 66, strongly criticized the statement, saying that as a public figure he must be “careful” about what he says.
“There’s no need to be careful,” she declared to the interviewer. “If I had been careful, I wouldn’t have said any of the things I just said.
“I would have just said, ‘Hello, welcome. I baked banana bread. This is my dog. This is my home, blah, blah, blah. What do you want to know?’ There’s no way I can’t be who I am in this moment.”
About a week after Kirk, 31, was shot and killed on September 10, the “Halloween” star became emotional as she spoke about the right-wing political activist’s death, even though she did not agree with him politically.
“I mean, I disagreed with him on almost every point that I heard him say, but I believe he was a man of faith, and I hope that in the moment that he passes away, he feels connected to his faith,” she said on the Sept. 15 episode of the podcast “WTF With Marc Maron.”
“As abhorrent as his thoughts are to me, I still believe he is a father, a husband, and a man of faith. I hope he feels that, whatever ‘connected to God’ means,” Curtis added.
The Oscar winner then criticized the practice of people continuing to share the video of Kirk being shot.
“It reminds me of that horrible day when someone was assassinated on TV,” she said, explaining that she worries we have become “used to” such violent images.
Several fans criticized Curtis, who has a transgender daughter, for empathizing with Kirk, who has been criticized as racist, anti-LGBTQ and misogynist.
At one point, the late podcaster claimed that America’s “transgender issue” was “a thumping middle finger to God.”
One user tweeted last month, “I disagree with almost everything I’ve heard him say, but do I believe he’s a man of faith? The knots people tie themselves in trying to please both sides of the aisle are laughable.”
“Jamie, history is full of men who have done horrible things in the name of ‘faith,'” another added.
