A year ago, I wondered why Target wouldn't get rid of Hollywood celeb Chrissy Teigen.  The famous internet "influencer" and D-list actress was making millions from her cookware line, selling it at Target.

Yet she was always doing something disgusting.  She had a foul mouth that would sear the paint off lead, for one.  She got into scraps with President Trump, who was as grossed out about her words as anyone else.  When I first heard of her and looked at her tweets, I was aghast:

Teigen's entire Twitter page was like an unflushed toilet, with the foulest of language directed at Trump, interspersed in a hellscape of vulgarities, banalities, and trivialities such as a video of herself in the act of passing gas, if not manically laughing or else posting pictures of her kids accompanied by foul-language observations.  It was an open call for eye bleach. 

Trump must have known who Teigen is in describing her as "filthy mouthed," of all the things he could have done to describe her.  But rather than show him otherwise by not being foul-mouthed for a spell, Teigen stepped up the barnyard language, emitting an amazingly vile and vulgar series of tweets: [bad tweets]

And Target is shilling merchandise with this vulgarian's name on it?

She posed topless with her two-year old son in tow and spread it around on Instagram.

She made herself queen of cancel culture, leading a call to boycott Goya Foods because its CEO said kind things about President Trump.  Then she was seen using Goya products herself in one of her social media posts, exempting herself from that boycott, but obviously not you.

In what should have been the last straw for Target, she shoved $200,000 into a fund for Minneapolis looters who, among other things, had forced the closure of 24 Target stores, and later, the U.S. flagship store downtown, once again due to looting, though they didn't quite say that.  At the time, I wondered:

Does Target have any self-respect at all? Here's the face of incentivization of looters, and they continue to employ her? Would they continue to employ a cashier who stole from the till, or a backroom-jobber who slipped bales of blue jeans out the warehouse door? How big was the destruction at Target now that the looters have gotten their encouragement from Chrissie? Do normal people encourage the looting of the establishments that pay them?

It reminds me of a statement I heard from an old Irish-American reporter from my newspaper days who was a liberal in a largely conservative establishment. He got asked by leftists if he would be a source for their dishonest expose of the company. He told them hell no, saltily explaining: "You don't s--- where you eat. I get my paycheck from this company, right? So that's where I eat. I don't s--- where I eat." Chrissie Teigen, by that logic, s---- where she eats.

If Target doesn't  confront this enemy within who's effectively encouraging the looting of Target establishments, it's time for the shareholders to step in. How does succoring this person help their bottom line? Target employs celebrities who encourage looting? What a picture.

Those musings were in May 2020, a year ago, and they seemed as good a reason as any for Target to say goodbye to this bounder.  But somehow, they didn't.

Now Teigen's in another revolting stew.  Old tweets made in 2011, calling on a then-16-year-old named Courtney Stoddard to commit suicide, and then sending Stoddard creepy private messages, have surfaced.  According to Yahoo! News:

From 2011 to 2012, Teigen bullied the teenager, making references to her being a "backdoor Teen Mom," and tweeting at Stodden: "Do you have a family?" Teigen also made dehumanizing and oddly disgusting remarks about Stodden' sexuality and body, saying she thought Stodden had "brown urine" and "stinky pee." In one tweet, Teigen bluntly stated, "I hate you."

In addition, she insulted a nine-year-old child actress named Quvenzhané Wallis, who'd won well deserved awards, for her work as "cocky" and maybe even worse. 

Teigen knew that the Stoddard business was bad stuff and apologized, saying she was just an attention-seeking troll at the time, not exactly different from what she is now, which kind of rendered the apology useless.

But that stew coincides with Target finally pulling the plug on her.

According to the New York Post:

The retailer is no longer offering Teigen's line of cookware on its website, TMZ reported Thursday, a poorly timed revelation given the multi-hyphenate's ongoing drama with Courtney Stodden.

However, the site's sources note that the scrub actually occurred last month and that while the cookware line was initially exclusively offered through Target, "late last year, they decided to end the exclusivity."

Target confirmed the move to Page Six: "We made the mutual decision in December to no longer carry the cookware line, given our continued focus on brands we develop and that can only be found at Target."

It's a muddled explanation, but it's quite possibly true that it wasn't this latest scrap that did it.

If it's been months in the making, then the bankrolling of looters of Target stores ought to have made Target officials madder.  Too bad they didn't say the truth of things, given Teigen's awfulness.  Like most corporations, they were likely intimidated by the movement.  But to have this person as a company ambassador was obviously worse as time went on.  This is the kind of person who chases customers away, not someone who actually brings them in.  In any case, keeping her on was just going to lead to more embarrassment and lost sales.

Getting woke, going broke, as so many other corporates have learned.  Well, better late than never, Target, and certainly, good riddance. 

Image: Logo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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