January 2023: Clarkson apologizes directly to Harry and Meghan.
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Earlier this week, Clarkson said on Instagram that he emailed an apology directly to the Duke and Duchess on Christmas Day, December 25.
He said that he had filed his article without reading it fully, and only realized the gravity of what he had said after the column received backlash the next day.
“In that precise moment when we suddenly realize we’ve completely messed up,” he wrote in the social media statement. “You are sweaty and cold at the same time. And your head pounds. And you feel sick. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Had I really said that? It was horrible.”
Clarkson also denied that he is “sexist” and said that he didn’t intend to encourage “violence against women.”
Clarkson said in his statement that in his email to Meghan and Harry, he explained the reasoning for his column.
“I said I was baffled by what they had been saying on TV but that the language I’d used in my column was disgraceful and that I was profoundly sorry,” the presenter wrote.
In a statement issued to Variety responding to Clarkson’s post, a spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said that Clarkson wrote only to Prince Harry, not Meghan.
“The contents of his correspondence were marked Private and Confidential,” the spokesperson said. “While a new public apology has been issued today by Mr. Clarkson, what remains to be addressed is his long-standing pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories, and misogyny.”
The statement continued: “Unless each of his other pieces were also written ‘in a hurry,’ as he states, it is clear that this is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.”
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