Former Glee-star Samantha Marie Ware gave her formal response to Lea Michele’s apology and she was not convinced by her former Glee costar’s words.
Ware told Variety. “All that her apology did was affirm that she hasn’t learned anything,”
After Ware accused the actress of making her time on Glee a “living hell,” the former Glee star, Lea Michele apologized in her Instagram. Ware responded to Michele recent tweet that supports for Black Lives Matter Movement. On the other hand, Michele apologized for being “perceived as insensitive”.
Ware elaborated her experiences when she was working with Michele on Glee, and alleged that the star tried to have her fired and that nobody on set stood up for her.
Ware became part of the show on its sixth season and said Michele show her diva side during a large shoot after Ware was “goofing around when the camera wasn’t on me.”
“She waited until the scene was over and she stopped in the middle of the stage and did a ‘come here’ gesture, like how a mother does to their child,” Ware recounted, saying she felt humiliated. “I said ‘no,’ and that’s when she decided to threaten my job, and said she would call [Glee co-creator] Ryan Murphy in to come and fire me.”
Ware said she had a talk with Michele after the heat and Michele “told me to shut my mouth.”
“She said I don’t deserve to have that job,” Ware said. “She talked about how she has reign. And here’s the thing: I completely understood that, and I was ready to be like, ‘This is your show. I’m not here to be disrespectful.’ But at that point, we were already past the respect and she was just abusing her power.”
To make matters worse, Ware said no one on set stood up for her as they were afraid.
“Lea’s actions were nothing new, so I guess since it was such a common thing, my case didn’t seem like that big of a deal,” Ware said. “I remember the first day I actually spoke up and unfortunately no one did anything. They just shrugged it off, like ‘That’s her.’ No one was stopping these things, which is an issue because the environment was helping perpetuate this abuse.”
Ware said after Michele loudly threatened to defecate in her wig in front of others “some chuckled and some gasped … but no one was going to stand up to her.”
“Everyone minded their business or said, ‘I’m sorry, I wish I had the power to stop this, but this is just the way it is, and this is just how it’s been’ – which means I wasn’t the first person to have been in that situation,” Ware told Variety.
Also, Glee star Heather Morris spoke her experiences and she called Michele “unpleasant to work with” and took responsibility for “[allowing] it to go on for so long without speaking out.”
However, Ware pointed out that she doesn’t think Michele is a racist, she said her former castmate’s wig comment was racially charged, given that “Black women historically are known for their wigs.”
“It shouldn’t have to take my tweet. When you tweet, ‘Black lives matter,’ that would mean you have an understanding of what that hashtag means, but it’s clear that it doesn’t,” Ware added. “Does Lea even know what a microaggression is? I don’t know. All that her apology did was affirm that she hasn’t learned anything. Am I calling Lea a racist? No. Does Lea have racist tendencies? I think Lea suffers from a symptom of living in this world in an industry that is tailored to white people.”
Meanwhile, Michele has not yet responded on Ware’s allegations.
