Slayyyter Hits Billboard Top 25 Then 2012 Racist Tweets Find Her Again
Her private Twitter response calls it 'cancel me over high school' ... her 2020 handwritten apology called the same tweets 'disgusting and ignorant.' The distance between those two framings is the actual story.
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Slayyyter's third album debuted at No. 22 on the Billboard 200 in March 2026 and earned Pitchfork's Best New Music designation that same week. She played Coachella in April and the Tonight Show in May. By October 22, her old tweets were trending again.
The tweets are from 2012 and 2013. She ran a Fifth Harmony stan account at 15 and 16. The posts included repeated use of the N-word and other racial slurs. They first surfaced in December 2019, triggering two rounds of apology.
This week's resurfacing landed on a private Twitter account she keeps separate from her public presence. Per GAY POP's October 22 reporting, she wrote: "everyone is trying to cancel me over things and behaviours from my high school days."
The 2020 Apology Said Something Different
In late 2019, she responded with a Notes app statement calling the posts "appalling" and saying she had used slurs to seem edgy. In early 2020, she posted a handwritten apology directly to her Black followers, acknowledging she "knew those words were slurs" and used them anyway. She directed proceeds from CD and vinyl sales to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and the Black Trans Travel Fund.
The 2020 framing was clear: she knew what she was doing. The 2026 framing is "cancel me over high school." Those two statements are not compatible. Framing accountability as victimhood six years after taking explicit responsibility for knowing better is a step backward, not a step forward.
Why This Keeps Happening
The mechanism here is straightforward. Slayyyter had a small independent fanbase in 2019. The 2020 apologies landed in front of a few hundred thousand people. "Worst Girl in America" brought her to a Billboard 200 debut, a Coachella slot, late-night TV, and several million new listeners who had never heard of her before this year. A new audience means a new discovery cycle for everything that already happened.
That dynamic is documented. Her Wikipedia page notes she has not made any public racist comments since the original controversy. The question for 2026 is not whether a teenager's mistakes should define a thirty-year-old forever. It is whether calling the resulting scrutiny a "cancel attempt" helps anything, or whether it just confirms that the introspective part of the 2020 apology has expired.
What the Album Title Actually Costs
"Worst Girl in America" is a reclamation gesture: ironic, self-aware, a pop star owning an identity that critics tried to stick to her. The problem is that the worst-girl receipts are actual receipts. When those receipts resurface alongside a brand built on the phrase, the irony collapses.
The Black fans she specifically apologized to in 2020 are not obligated to accept any framing, 2020 or 2026. That was true then and it is true now. A brother album, "Worst Man in America," is scheduled for December 4, 2026. She will carry this through the promotional cycle.
Ad Watch News is an independent commentary site. We have no affiliation with Slayyyter, Columbia Records, or any label or artist named here. All facts are drawn from the published sources listed below.
Sources & further reading
- GAY POP Substack: Is Slayyyter Still the Worst Girl in America? (Oct 22, 2026)
- Billboard: Slayyyter Pens Handwritten Apology for Past Racist Tweets (Jan 2020)
- Far Out Magazine: Pop star Slayyyter apologises for "appalling" racist tweets (2019)
- Wikipedia: Slayyyter (biography, discography, controversy)
- Wikipedia: Worst Girl in America (album details, chart performance)
- Wikimedia Commons: Slayyyter at Neon Skies Festival, Edmonton, July 18, 2026. Photo: Valimpacted, CC BY 4.0
