TikTok stars Lunden Stallings and Olivia Bennett are embroiled in controversy just days after their viral wedding.
The lesbian couple, who amassed over 700K followers on TikTok for documenting their relationship, wed on September 30th, 2023 at Naylor Hall in Roswell, Georgia. Many fans dubbed their fairytale nuptials “the royal wedding of lesbian TikTok.”
“There was nobody back then that looked like us, that was represented as a lesbian,” Olivia told PEOPLE for their wedding profile. “We’re very grateful that we’re part of this movement.”
Amid the celebration, screenshots of Lunden’s tweets from 2012-2014 were posted to Reddit, in which the influencer reportedly used the n-word “hundreds” of times and told China to “go back to ur country and make us some medals,” presumably in reference to the 2012 Olympics.
The majority of these screenshots have since been removed from Reddit.
The backlash prompted the couple, who were on their honeymoon, to make an apology on their TikTok story. In the video, which disappeared after 24 hours, Lunden explained that her use of racist and xenophobic language was from growing up in the South. She claimed she was a teenager at the time of writing those tweets.
“I am completely and utterly disgusted and ashamed and honestly embarrassed at how normal it was for me to speak that way on Twitter and to, I don’t know, for my friends and I to address each other that way,” she said. “The reason why I’m addressing this is because that’s not who I am today.”
“That’s what kills me the most, that at one point in time I thought that that was OK, I thought that that was normal,” she continued.
In the video, Olivia called Lunden’s tweets “a really unfortunate and disgusting and ignorant mistake that you made as a teenager.”
Days later, Olivia is now facing similar backlash after past racist tweets of hers seemingly also resurfaced.
While Olivia reportedly didn’t use the n-word in nearly as many tweets as her wife, she did use it once in a tweet from 2013. She also allegedly shared a screenshot in which her brother used it.
This has led fans to call out the hypocrisy of Olivia sitting next to Lunden during the apology video and failing to share that she herself had made similar tweets.
Others feel disappointed given that the women platformed inclusion as a pillar of their content and leveraged their relationship to prove that the perception of the LGBTQ+ community was changing in the South.
The women have not addressed Olivia’s resurfaced tweets at the time of writing.
Check back for updates.