Samantha Bee issued an apology to First Daughter Ivanka Trump Thursday after calling her the c-word during a segment on her TBS show Full Frontal.
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.
— Samantha Bee (@iamsambee) May 31, 2018
“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,” Bee tweeted. “It was inappropriate and inexcusable. I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it.”
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In the segment, Bee took aim at Trump for posting a photo of herself and her son Theodore over the weekend while reports spread that almost 1,500 children who were separated from their parents while trying to illegally cross the border into the U.S. in 2017 were unaccounted for.
Bee, while acknowledging that migrant-parent separation happened during the Obama Administration as well, used a profanity while urging Ivanka Trump to influence her father Wednesday night.
“Let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless c—,” she said. “He listens to you. Put on something tight and low cut and tell him to f—ing stop it. Tell him it was an Obama thing and see how it goes, OK?”
Many took offense to Bee’s use of the c-word, slamming her as sexist and drawing comparisons to Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet about Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, which ultimately ended in the ABC cancelling Roseanne.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Bee’s comment “vile and vicious” and urged Time Warner, which owns TBS and CNN parent Turner, to take disciplinary action.
“The collective silence by the left and its media allies is appalling,” she said. “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.”
TBS issued a statement in support of Bee’s apology Thursday, calling her language “vile and inappropriate.”
“Samantha Bee has taken the right action in apologizing for the vile and inappropriate language she used about Ivanka Trump last night,” the network said in a statement. “Those words should not have been aired. It was our mistake too, and we regret it.”
Samantha Bee has taken the right action in apologizing for the vile and inappropriate language she used about Ivanka Trump last night. Those words should not have been aired. It was our mistake too, and we regret it.
— TBS Network (@TBSNetwork) May 31, 2018
The video has since been removed from Full Frontal‘s YouTube channel, although clips of it remain on Twitter.
While some drew comparisons to Barr’s racist tweet and Bee’s inappropriate comment toward Trump, some argued that Bee’s was not a fireable offense like Barr’s, because although hateful, it was not racist.
Samantha Bee’s comment was hateful and distasteful, but it wasn’t racist. If you want to fire her for making hateful comments, then you can’t defend Trump for doing the exact same thing on a daily basis!
— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) May 31, 2018
President Donald Trump‘s administration stepped up criminal prosecutions of people illegally crossing the border this month, re-sparking the debate around the administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border.
