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ABC/Ida Mae AstuteKevin Hart was severely criticized for not issuing a formal apology for his old, anti-gay tweets, which caused so much controversy that he was forced to step down from hosting the Academy Awards. Now, the comedian claims he’d actually apologized for those tweets a long time ago.
“I talked about this years ago and I said I’ll never do it again. To me, that was the apology,” he tells USA Today. ”The apology was never doing it again. So I didn’t understand why that wasn’t good [enough]. Why isn’t the 10-year change of a guy never talking like this, never doing it again through stand-up or jokes, being noticed?”
However, the Night School star says he is “remorseful” for the derogatory comments, and has learned from his mistakes.
“I had several conversations with good friends of mine that are part of the LGBTQ community, and listened and heard the point of view that was very important, which was, ‘Hey, Kevin, we just want to know that you don’t feel the way you felt then. We wanted to hear you say that,’ which is what a good friend of mine, Lee Daniels, told me,” Hart explains. “And I said, “You know what, Lee, I can understand that.”
“I thought that me putting my change on display and never going back to that was the best way to do that,” Hart adds. “If the verbal [apology] would have been better, then I can understand that. But at the time, I didn’t grasp that concept of just wanting to hear that again.”
Hart’s new comedy special, Irresponsible, taped last September on London’s O2 Arena, premieres Tuesday on Netflix.
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"Doing again anti-gay apologize Apology didnt formally kevin never the tweets
