UPDATE 5/19, 6:10 p.m. ET: Alison Roman's New York Times column has been put on "on temporary leave," the publication said in a statement to the Daily Beast. Roman's hiatus comes after she was criticized for comments she made about Chrissy Teigen.
See original story below.
Best-selling cookbook author Alison Roman recently criticized the rapid growth of Chrissy Teigen's cooking and lifestyle platforms, as well as Gwyneth Paltrow and Marie Kondo capitalizing on their large fan bases to expand their respective brands.
"I would also have to let go of so much control," Roman said in an interview with New Consumer about not compromising her brand for the sake of growth. "I run my social media, my own Instagram. I run my own Twitter. The idea that I would ever not do that— and that I would somehow lend my brand to someone else who's going to approximate me—horrifies me. I'd rather stay small and always be myself. But at the same time, I do need to figure out how to turn this into money. Straight up."
Roman would go on to criticize how Teigen uses her platform as well.
"Like, what Chrissy Teigen has done is so crazy to me," she said. "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 fucking money."
Teigen did not appreciate any of these comments at all, taking to Twitter to voice her disappointment.
"This is a huge bummer and hit me hard," Teigen tweeted Friday night. "I have made her recipes for years now, bought the cookbooks, supported her on socialworks and praised her in interviews. I even signed on to executive produce the very show she talks about doing in this article."
Before these tweets and after receiving some backlash on Twitter, Roman would also try to walk back some of the statements she made in the interview when she tweeted on Friday afternoon: "I want to clarify, I am not coming for anyone who's successful, especially not women," she wrote. "I was trying to clarify that my business model does not include a product line, which work very well for some, but I don't see working for me."
