Star finally addresses disaster TV gaffe

Kelly Osbourne continues to be haunted by comments she made on live TV in 2015, describing the gaffe as “the worst thing I’ve ever done”.

The British personality, now 39, featured on an episode of talk show The View shortly after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the US presidency, where he infamously declared he’d build a “great wall” along the Mexico border in a bid to block out immigrants.

“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” Trump said at the time.

Unpacking Trump’s disparaging remarks on-air, Osbourne made a foot-in-her-mouth comment that many deemed as racist.

“If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilets, Donald Trump?” Osbourne said, swiftly receiving an icy reception from her fellow panellists.
 

While Osbourne clarified she was trying to highlight the impact of banning immigrants from the US, the statement was widely considered offensive to Latinos, stereotyping the community as service workers.

Speaking candidly to Rolling Stone, Osbourne shared how she’s been unable to escape the comments she made all those years ago, with the clip regularly surfacing on social media platforms, like TikTok.

“It’s the most cringe moment of my entire life,” Osbourne told the publication.

“But to see people be creative with it does put a smile on my face. It turns something so ugly into something funny.”

She continued, “It hurt a lot of people, and that to me, is by far makes it the worst thing I’ve ever done.

“I realised that I’m not great on live TV and that words are so powerful. And to be labelled as something you’re not is really difficult. But it happened. There’s nothing I can do.”

In hindsight, Osbourne conceded she should have been more careful with her words.

“I feel very strongly that Latin American culture is the backbone of America. I believe that Latin Americans are the hardest-working people you will ever meet,” she said.

“This whole country is built on immigrants, and if you stop people from coming into this country who do the jobs that make this country exist and thrive and flourish, who’s going to do all the jobs that you don’t want to do yourself? It came out so wrong.”
 

In saying that, Osbourne admitted she wasn’t in the best stage of her life at the time of making the remarks, revealing she’d just had a stint in rehab and was a self-proclaimed “self-righteous little c**t.”

“[Rehab] wasn’t for drugs, it was more my anxiety disorder, my depression disorder, childhood trauma, all of that kind of stuff,” she said.

“During that time, my dad [Ozzy] had just cheated on my mother [Sharon]. I was drinking to numb the pain of everything.

“I was a trash can when it came to drugs, whatever I could get my hands on. And I was a really broken, scared person. And then after that event, it kind of kickstarted me taking a long, hard look at myself and the things that I don’t like and the things that I’d like to change and the things that I’d like to keep.”

The singer, who welcomed her first child, son Sid Wilson, in November 2022, added she will use her own mistakes to teach her son about understanding privilege.
 

“I’m going to have to play that video for my son at one point and explain it to him. That is probably the cherry on the cake of how painful all of this is. I want him to understand what I was trying to say and how powerful words are,” she said.

“I didn’t know what white privilege was because you just go along living your life and until somebody points out that something is, you don’t f**king know. Because like I said, it’s very different in England. But here [America] it’s like, if you’re white, you’re privileged, period.

“I am privileged not just because of who my parents are or the colour of my skin, it’s that the life that I have is very privileged. And for a long time, I took that for granted because I didn’t understand it.”