The Model Who Lied About Being Transgender After Making Anti-Trans Comments Said She Is “Taking Full Responsibility”
Article via BuzzFeed
In her first comments on the controversy, Savage X Fenty model Carissa Pinkston told BuzzFeed News, “I definitely feel like a trans person in a way — in high school I was really bullied.”
The 20-year-old model who became a face of the Savage X Fenty brand — and who recently admitted to lying about being transgender to cover up for anti-trans comments she made on Facebook in May — told BuzzFeed News she is now “taking full responsibility for what [she] said.”
In her first comments about the controversy, Carissa Pinkston opened up to BuzzFeed News, saying, “I definitely feel like a trans person in a way — in high school I was really bullied.”
“I remember being in school being little and taking tissues and trying to put them in my shirt,” she claimed in a phone interview. Pinkston initially demanded payment for an interview; when BuzzFeed News declined, she called back to talk.
Pinkston didn’t say if she
identifies as transgender. However, in response to admitting over the
weekend to falsely coming out, she told BuzzFeed News: “I’m taking full
responsibility for what I said.”
The initial lie, then the apparent justification for the lie, all spun out earlier this year when a high school friend named Cecelia Jinks screenshotted and tweeted anti-trans comments Pinkston made on her personal Facebook page suggesting that transgender women are not women.
Jinks told BuzzFeed News she was friendly with Pinkston, and shared
mutual friends with her when they attended school in Lancaster,
Pennsylvania. She said she found the Facebook comments to be anti-trans
and “utterly disappointing.”
But when she saw her old classmate falsely saying she was transgender last week in an Instagram post that’s now deleted, she felt she had to say something and began tweeting @SavageXFenty.
“I double-checked with all my friends who have known her for years and years, and when I was finally 100% sure she was lying I was horrified,” Jinks said. Pinkston denies knowing Jinks or being friends with her at all.
Jinks added, “Not only was I appalled that she lied about something so sensitive to so many people, but that she did so to cover up her mistake of making transphobic posts on social media.”
Fellow models also chimed in on social media.
