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Lea Michele has since lost endorsements.
By Bernadette Giacomazzo — Written on Jun 02, 2020
With all the weirdness of 2020, we're only halfway through the year, and the latest celebrity news just keeps getting weirder and weirder.
Today's bit of weird celebrity news comes courtesy of Glee, the hit TV show that taught the world — or, at least, a group of fans — to sing in perfect harmony. While everyone thought that the stars of the show were going to be BFFs forever, subsequent revelations proved that behind the scenes, Glee was more like Game of Thrones in real life, allegedly complete with a Queen Cersei-like villain in lead actress Lea Michele.
While this isn't the first time that Michele has been accused of bullying behavior, this is the first time reports of her bad behavior went viral courtesy of someone not named Naya Rivera.
So, we decided to try to find out:
Who is Samantha Ware, the former Glee actress who went viral for her racial bullying claims against Lea Michele?
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Ware played Jane Hayward.
Samantha Marie Ware, as she's known professionally, played Jane Hayward, who was a recurring character on the sixth season of Glee. Most of her acting has been confined to theater — in 2012, she played Nala in The Lion King. In 2013, she played Nabulungi Hatimbi in The Book of Mormon. And in 2016, she played Peggy Schuyler/Maria Reynolds in the original Chicago cast of Hamilton: An American Musical.
She accused Lea Michele of wanting to do something pretty gross during their tenure on Glee.
Lea Michele posted a tweet in support of George Floyd and the black lives matter movement, which you can see below.
This tweet prompted Ware to take to Twitter to accuse Michele of being a hypocrite in a tweet of her own. But she didn't stop there: in addition to claiming that Michele "made her life a living hell" while they were on Glee, she accused Michele of race-based "microaggressions" that made her rethink her Hollywood career, and also accused her of threatening to defecate in her wig. (Yikes!) Check it out below.
Many of Ware & Michelle's Glee co-stars leaped to Ware's defense.
Alex Newell and Amber Riley both leaped to Ware's defense when she made her pretty shocking claim. While Riley merely posted a tweet featuring a "drinking tea" GIF, Newell took it a step further. "I’m gonna say this one time... when my friends goes through something traumatic I also go through it... that’s what friendship is... and if you can’t understand that then you’re part of the problem... and that’s on PERIODT! And I mean that for both sides of this coin!" she wrote.
This is not the first time Lea Michele has been accused of bad behavior by her Glee castmembers.
The most infamous feud in the Glee world is, of course, between Naya Rivera (who played Santana on the show) and Lea Michele. Throughout Glee's run — from 2009 to 2015 — plenty of reports leaked from the set detailing the drama between Rivera and Michele. It was so bad, in fact, that Rivera went into great detail about how horrible Michele was to her in her 2016 memoir, Sorry Not Sorry: Dreams, Mistakes, And Growing Up. "One of the Glee writers once said that Lea and I were like two sides of the same battery and that about sums us up. We are both strong-willed and competitive — not just with each other but with everyone — and that’s not a good mixture," she said. Of course, at the time of her memoir's release, Rivera was accused of having "sour grapes."
Michele's bad behavior got her all but blacklisted from Hollywood — and she even lost an endorsement over it.
Talent can only take you so far in Hollywood, and it seems like Michele had to learn this the hard way. Michele's bad behavior was so legendary, in fact, that during the prime of her career, she was shunned on several red carpets by some of Hollywood's biggest stars, including Jessica Lange. And while Michele tried to defend her behavior by saying that on Broadway being a "diva" is "awesome," it ultimately worked against her, as several blogs popped up to attack her. Based on her iMDB page, she's not exactly "booked and busy," either: since Glee, she's only had four credits to her name.
And, it seems, things just got a little worse for Michele. Just a few hours after Ware made her claims, HelloFresh — the food subscription box service who had Michele as their spokeswoman — announced that they were cutting ties with her. "HelloFresh does not condone racism nor discrimination of any kind. We are disheartened and disappointed to learn of the recent claims concerning Lea Michele. We take this very seriously, and have ended our partnership with Lea Michele, effective immediately," they said in a statement.
Michele issued a formal apology for her behavior.
After receiving a backlash, and getting her HelloFresh contract canceled, Michele issued a formal apology for her behavior.
"What matters is that I clearly acted in ways which hurt other people. Whether it was my privileged position and perspective that caused me to be perceived as insensitive or inappropriate at times or whether it was just my immaturity and me just being unnecessarily difficult, I apologize for my behavior and for any pain which I have caused. We all can grow and change and I have definitely used these past several months to reflect on my own shortcomings," she said.
Bernadette Giacomazzo is an editor, writer, publicist, and photographer whose work has appeared in Teen Vogue, People, Us Weekly, The Source, XXL, HipHopDX, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, BET.com, and more.