Rebel Wilson has poked fun at The Sydney Morning Herald, months after the publication threatened to “out” the actor and her relationship with Ramona Agruma.
The 42-year-old actor threw shade at the publication while presenting at the AACTA Awards on Tuesday. During her speech, she reflected on some big milestones she’s had this year, seemingly referring to how she welcomed her daughter via surrogate in August and how she annuounced that she was dating Arguma in June. She then joked that she wanted to share some other things about her life before The Sydney Morning Herald had the opportunity to.
“There’s been some big things that have happened in my life this year, like big changes,” she said on stage at the event, the Irish Mirror reported. “I just switched from dairy to soy. I thought I should just tell you guys now and get the jump on The Sydney Morning Herald.”
Her joke comes months after the Australian newspaper published a now-deleted article, stating they had given Wilson “two days” to comment on her new relationship before they would go ahead and report on it. In the article, journalist Andrew Hornery complained about Wilson stopping him from getting a scoop.
The piece, which first released in June, came days after the Senior Year star came out on Instagram.
She shared a photo of her and Arguma, along with a caption that reads: “I thought I was searching for a Disney Prince… but maybe what I really needed all this time was a Disney Princess.”
When many people slammed The Sydney Herald and defended Wilson on social media in June, the actor took to Twitter to address the situation.
“Thanks for your comments, it was a very hard situation but trying to handle it with grace,” she wrote.
This was in reply to a post by 10 News First journalist Kate Doak, that read: “So apparently it wasn’t @RebelWilson’s choice to come out… The @smh/@theage have admitted to giving her a heads up 2 days in advance that they were going to ‘out’ her. What’s worse, openly gay men at The Sydney Morning Herald were involved in this.”
Following the backlash, the newspaper’s editor, Bevan Shields, issued a statement denying any wrongdoing.
“Like other mastheads do every day, we simply asked questions and as standard practice included a deadline for a response,” he wrote. “I had made no decision about whether or what to publish, and The Herald‘s decision about what to do would have been informed by any response Wilson supplied.”
“Private Sydney is a column in which the writer’s interaction with his subjects is often part of the story,” the statement concluded, at the time. “Saturday’s piece followed that theme in giving readers insights into our interaction with Wilson and her PR team. This was not a standard news story.”
In a replacement column, Hornery apologised for the article, noting that “as a gay man,” he is “aware of how deeply discrimination hurts” and would never want to “inflict that pain on someone else”.
“A celebrity romance is a happy story,” he continued. “When I started hearing from friends and associates of Rebel that she was in a new relationship, as a gossip columnist I could see that was potentially a story, as her previous boyfriends had been.”
He then shared the contents of the email asking Wilson for comment on her relationship, indicating it “was never intended to be a threat” but rather to establish that Hornery was “sufficiently confident with [the] information and to open a conversation”.
