Morgan Wallen stopped by Good Morning America on Friday to address using a racial slur in a video that was leaked in February.
via: Page Six
“I wouldn’t say [I’ve used it] frequently. No, no, not frequently. It was just around this certain group of friends,” the country singer, 28, told Michael Strahan on “Good Morning America” Friday in his first interview since the scandal.
Wallen faced immense backlash on social media in February after TMZ published a video of him drunkenly telling a friend to “take care of this p–y-ass n—a” when they returned home from a night out in Nashville.
The “Whiskey Glasses” singer’s record label, Big Loud, swiftly responded by indefinitely suspending him, and several radio stations stopped playing his music.
“My manager called me probably two hours before the video came out,” Wallen recalled Friday. “He was, like, ‘Are you sitting down?’ And no one’s ever called me and said that before.”
The CMA Award winner acknowledged to Strahan, 49, that he was “clearly drunk” in the video, which he said led to him saying “dumb stuff” on “hour 72 of a 72-hour bender” with his friends.
“In our minds, it’s playful, you know?” he said. “I don’t know if that sounds ignorant, but that’s really where it came from. It’s wrong. … I didn’t mean it in any derogatory manner at all.”
In the midst of the scandal, Wallen checked into a rehab facility for 30 days.
“I spent some time out in San Diego, California, you know, just trying to figure it out,” he told Strahan. “Why am I acting this way? Do I have an alcohol problem? Do I have a deeper issue?”
.@ABC NEWS EXCLUSIVE: @MorganWallen reveals to @michaelstrahan he spent 30 days in rehab following the incident and he says he donated the money from his spike in album sales to Black organizations. https://t.co/PXMd3zA5En pic.twitter.com/BAZI4uFXXf
— Good Morning America (@GMA) July 23, 2021
Wallen also revealed he donated a portion of his album sales this year to groups supporting Black people and Black musicians, like the Black Music Action Coalition.
“Before this incident, my album was already doing well,” Wallen said. “It was already being well-received by critics and by fans. Me and my team noticed that whenever this whole incident happened that there was a spike in my sales. So we tried to calculate what the number of – how much it actually spiked from this incident.”
“We got to a number somewhere around $500,000, and we decided to donate that money to some organizations – BMAC being the first one,” he continued.
