One of my favorite TikTok couples is Lunden Rose and Olivia Bennett. If you aren’t familiar with the couple, Lunden and Olivia are a newly-married couple who live in Georgia. Their content on the app has consisted of fit checks, wedding preparation, Q&As, and more. However, shortly after these two tied the knot on Sept. 30, racist tweets from Lunden Rose, which she published between 2012 and 2014, resurfaced online.Â
Dozens of Lunden’s tweets, which were shared on the couple’s subreddit page right after their wedding, consist of rap lyrics and racist remarks. In response, on Oct. 3, Lunden and Olivia posted a 10-minute long Story to their joint TikTok account, addressing the tweets while on their honeymoon. Because the couple has a shared TikTok account, Olivia sat next to Lunden for the entirety of the video, and added her own commentary and opinions on the tweets.
In the video, Lunden explained she is “completely and utterly disgusted and ashamed and honestly, embarrassed at how normal it was for me to speak that way on Twitter… and for my friends and I to address each other that way… there’s no room for me to defend myself.” She then told her followers that the reason she was addressing the tweets was because “it’s not who I am today. That’s not me, that’s not what I stand for, it’s not what I believe in… that’s what kills me the most is that at one point in time, I thought it was OK and I thought that it was normal, and that’s nobody else’s fault but mine.” Lunden also confirmed that the Twitter account has been deactivated.Â
Later in the video, Lunden talked about how she has since educated herself and participated in “multiple marches,” and that racism is not what she stands for or what she believes in. Olivia then joined the conversation, saying, “It is an unfortunate, disgusting, and ignorant mistake that you made as a teenager and I don’t think it reflects at all who you are today.”Â
While Lunden apologized many times throughout the video and encouraged people to reach out to her if they wanted to talk about it, fans pointed out that she never addressed the sheer amount of problematic tweets, and how they were posted quite consistently for over two years. Some of the comments on the video also noted that it was posted as a Story, which expires 24 hours after being published. Her Campus reached out to Lunden’s team for comment, but didn’t hear back by the time of publication.Â