Tom Joyner Checks Tyrese for ‘Fat’ & ‘Nasty’ Comments, Tyrese Apologizes Again

By: Amanda Anderson-Niles

R&B singer and actor Tyrese has a way with words, and oftentimes he says things that end up becoming controversial. When he’s not giving women advice on how to find love, he’s tweeting about numerous subjects like health and even plenty of motivational quotes on his Twitter account. However, in an attempt to motivate people about losing weight and becoming healthy if they might be overweight, he managed to cause outrage after he referred to overweight people as fat and nasty. After refusing to apologize via his Twitter account, he eventually offered up an apology twice through several tweets. However, radio personality Tom Joyner expressed in his blog that he thought Tyrese went too far, He writes:

There comes a point in almost every celebrity or high-profile person’s life when they’re asked about a topic that is bound to cause controversy. What people don’t seem to understand is that in most cases, it’s a set up. When you say the appropriate, expected, politically correct thing, you’re boring and it does nothing for the interviewer’s ratings, magazine subscriptions or the numbers of followers they have on social media. Say something way out of the box and people can’t stop talking about you, the show or publication lucky enough to get you to say something foolish.

It’s all about business, and numbers and popularity…no matter what kind of risk it is to your career.

You have to be smart enough to use the media in your favor and not let it use you to say something that could alienate you from the people who love and support what you do.

Some of Tyrese’s defenders say his words were taken out of context and if we had heard him for ourselves we would have been able to tell that he wasn’t being mean-spirited.

That may be true, but that’s the risk people take when they get too far out of their lanes. I can name 10 comedians off the top of my head who could have said the same thing and gotten a huge laugh. But Tyrese isn’t a comedian. And while we’re on the topic of people getting caught up, let me say Jay-Z is not an Obama spokesman, and Dennis Rodman is not a diplomat or an ambassador or anything that should make him think he can represent the U.S. in North Korea.

Tyrese took heed to Tom Joyner’s words and made a public apology on his radio show. He says:

“I want to go on the record and say this. I wrote a book called “How to Get Out Of Your Own Way” and it had a chapter “Your Body Is a Slave Of Your Mind.” And I was talking about me putting on 265 pound and me getting out of the shower with the mirror steamed up and me being ashamed of myself. Me, kind of falling apart and going through whatever I was going through and losing touch with my focus. If you go back to the movie ‘Waist Deep,” I was 255 in that movie. It wasn’t directed at women it was directed at anyone who finds themselves uninspired and unmotivated when it comes to their health. We got 20 million something people dying of obesity.

“It was a poor choice of words in that particular article but for me, I did a book and I talked about this topic and it was an uncomfortable read but I also exposed myself and talked about how my career was literally falling apart in front of me and I got lazy in terms of my health. It was a bad choice of words. For those people that I rubbed the wrong way from my poor choice of wording, here’s my public apology. I was really putting myself out there, exposing my own truths. If I’m being insensitive, I’ m actually talking about my mama, my sisters and everyone else. That wasn’t the goal of the interview. The goal was to motivate and inspire. It was a bad choice of words, period.”