Samantha Bee said she takes “responsibility” for the controversy surrounding her vulgar comment about Ivanka Trump on her show, Full Frontal.
Bee was in Hollywood Thursday night to accept an honor from the Television Academy, where she spent part of her acceptance speech discussing the controversy.
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“You know, the thing is our show is steeped in passion,” Bee said, reports IndieWire. “Every week I strive to show the world as I see it, unfiltered. Sometimes I should probably have a filter. I accept that. I take it seriously when I get it right and I do take responsibility when I get it wrong.”
In her speech Thursday night, Bee said Americans “spent the day wrestling with the repercussions of one bad word, when we all should have spent the day incensed that as a nation we are wrenching children from their parents and treating people legally seeking asylum as criminals. If we are okay with that then really, who are we?”
“I can tell you, as long as we have breath in our bodies and 21 minutes of airtime once a week, repeats on Saturdays, that we as a show will never stop shouting [about] the inhumanities of this world from the rooftops and striving to make it a better place,” Bee continued. “But in a comedy way.”
The Full Frontal team was awarded for its coverage on the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements.
On Wednesday night, Bee responded to reports that almost 1,500 children were separated from their parents while trying to reach the U.S. illegally in 2017 are now unaccounted for. Bee asked the First Daughter to talk to her father, President Donald Trump, about it, and used “feckless c–” to describe Ivanka Trump.
Bee later apologized in a tweet, writing, “I would like to sincerely apologize to Ivanka Trump and to my viewers for using an expletive on my show to describe her last night. It was inappropriate and inexcusable. I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it.”
TBS also apologized and pulled the video from YouTube.
The White House and President Trump have called for Bee to be fired.
“Why aren’t they firing no talent Samantha Bee for the horrible language used on her low ratings show? A total double standard but that’s okay, we are Winning, and will be doing so for a long time to come,” President Trump tweeted Friday morning.
In a statement to The Wrap, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Bee’s words “vile and vicious.”
“Her disgusting comments and show are not fit for broadcast, and executives at Time Warner and TBS must demonstrate that such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned on its network,” Sanders said.
