It didn’t take long for Kevin Hart to lose his Oscars hosting gig.
Just a day after Kevin Hart was announced as the 2019 Oscars host, he was forced to apologize and step down from the role after homophobic tweets surfaced from 2010 and 2011. The tweets, many of which have since been deleted, called a fellow actor “a gay bill board for AIDS.” Another Hart tweet said that he if saw his son playing with a dollhouse, he’d tell him, “stop, that’s gay.”
Hart initially declined to apologize for the tweets. In an Instagram video he published on Thursday, he said that he had grown as a person and didn’t want to “tap into the days of old.” He said he wouldn’t apologize. Soon after, Hart posted another video to his 66 million Instagram followers, saying that people need to “stop looking for reasons to be negative.” He again declined to apologize.
“I’m almost 40 years old and I’m in love with the man that I am becoming,” he wrote in the Instagram caption to his video. “You live and you learn and you grow and you mature.”
Hart’s comments and initial decision not to apologize angered those in the LGBTQ community, who said that his comments were insensitive and damaging.
“This is not good,” fellow comedian Billy Eichner tweeted after Hart’s second video. “A simple, authentic apology showing any bit of understanding or remorse would have been so simple.”
Late on Thursday after facing mounting backlash for his tweets and response to them, Hart took to his Twitter account, where he told his nearly 35 million followers that he “made the choice to step down from hosting this year’s Oscars.” He said he didn’t want to be “a distraction” from the evening and apologized for his old tweets.
“I sincerely apologize to the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past,” he tweeted.