Naomi Osaka was recently attacked by Piers Morgan for leaving the French Open. The 23-year-old tennis champion explained that she was not talking to reporters at the French Open, citing mental health reasons, leading to officials serving out a $15,000 fine. Osaka decided to withdraw from the grand slam tournament, and that didn’t sit well with the 56-year old television personality.
“This has got nothing to do with mental health,” Morgan wrote in his column for the Daily Mail. “What Osaka really means is that she doesn’t want to face the media if she hasn’t played well, because the beastly journalists might actually dare to criticize her performance.” Morgan also called Osaka “an arrogant spoiled brat” and fame has “inflated her ego to gigantic proportions.”
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Morgan also compared Osaka to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s situation. “This is straight out of the Meghan and Harry playbook of wanting to have the world’s largest cake and eating it, by exploiting the media for ruthlessly commercial self-promotion but using mental health to silence any media criticism,” Morgan stated. There were plenty of people on social media calling out Morgan for being a hypocrite. Earlier this year, Morgan walked off the set of Good Morning Britain after being called out for his treatment Markle by Alex Beresford.
“Piers Morgan, who literally walked off the set in the middle of his own show after getting the mildest possible pushback for his obsessive criticism of a female POC, has some thoughts about how a female POC should honor her professional obligations,” Don Moynihan wrote on Twitter. Morgan was also accused of attacking Osaka because of her skin color, which he denied.
“What does her skin colour have to do with it?” Morgan tweeted. “I’d have written the same column if Naomi Osaka was white. For you to now play the race card to attack & silence any perfectly justified criticism of her behaviour is shameful.”
In Osaka’s statement, she mentioned that she’s going to take some time away from tennis. “I’m gonna take some time away from the court now, but when the time is right I really want to work with the Tour to discuss ways we can make things better for the players, press and fans,” Osaka said in the statement. She also stated that she “wrote privately to the tournament apologizing and saying that I would be more than happy to speak with him after the tournament as the Slams are intense.”
