Alison Roman’s New York Times Column on Hold Following Chrissy Teigen Controversy

By Mackenzie Nichols

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Cookbook author Alison Roman, who writes a bi-weekly column for the New York Times, has been placed on temporary leave from the paper after she made controversial comments about Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo in an interview with the New Consumer .

A New York Times spokesperson confirmed to Variety that Roman’s column has been put on hiatus for an undetermined amount of time but didn’t specify why. The Daily Beast first reported the news of Roman’s absence.

Earlier this month, Roman faced backlash online for saying that Teigen and Kondo have capitalized on their fame to sell cooking products.

“Like, what Chrissy Teigen has done is so crazy to me,” Roman said in the New Consumer interview. “She had a successful cookbook. And then it was like: Boom, line at Target. Boom, now she has an Instagram page that has over a million followers where it’s just, like, people running a content farm for her. That horrifies me and it’s not something that I ever want to do. I don’t aspire to that. But like, who’s laughing now? Because she’s making a ton of f–king money.”

She also took jabs at Kondo, whose brand is centered around minimalism and throwing away unnecessary items, for creating a line of kitchen cutlery and more. “I’m like, damn b—h, you f–king just sold out immediately! Someone’s like ‘you should make stuff,’ and she’s like, ‘okay, slap my name on it, I don’t give a sh–!’” she said in the interview. “‘For the low, low price of $19.99, please to buy my cutting board!’ Like, no. … It feels greedy.”

Following the interview, Teigen wrote on Twitter that she was disappointed with Roman’s comments.

“This is a huge bummer and hit me hard,” Teigen wrote at the time. “I have made her recipes for years now, bought the cookbooks, supported her on social and praised her in interviews. I even signed on to executive produce the very show she talks about doing in this article.”

Roman has publicly apologized twice to Teigen in lengthy statements posted on social media. She called her own comments “stupid, crass and insensitive” and said she needs to “learn, and respect, the difference between being unfiltered and honest vs. being uneducated and flippant.”

“I’m not the victim here, and my insecurities don’t excuse this behavior I’m a white woman who has and will continue to benefit from white privilege and I recognize that makes what I said even more inexcusable and hurtful,” Roman wrote. “The fact that it didn’t occur to me that I had singled out two Asian women is one hundred percent a function of my privilege (being blind to racial insensitivities is a discriminatory luxury).

Teigen thanked Roman for her apology, responding on Twitter , “Thank u for this, @alisoneroman. The comments stung, but they moreso stung because they came from u! It wasn’t my usual news break of some random person hating everything about me!”

In response to the news that The New York Times was placing Roman on leave, Teigen said it “just sucks in every way.”