Ethel Cain responds to a ‘massive smear campaign’ that unearthed old posts

On July 9, Ethel Cain (AKA Hayden Anhedönia) shared a long public statement, responding to criticism for a series of offensive posts she made online as a 19-year-old. The posts from 2017 and 2018, largely taken from Twitter and the since-shuttered Q&A platform Curious Cat, reemerged across social media over the last couple of days, which have also seen the musician’s personal accounts, including Spotify, targeted by hackers. They date back to a period, Cain says, where she was trying to be as “inflammatory and controversial as possible”. 

“This was a chapter of my life I look back at shamefully,” she adds in the recent statement, which was shared via her Instagram account as a Google Doc. “I am not proud of my actions, and I have done my best to bury it as I feel strongly that no good can come from it. As I move forward through my life, I aim to use my platform for good, for change, and for progress.”

According to screenshots shared on X, the posts in question included jokes about racism, sexual assault, and incest, as well as an ‘admission’ of using the N-word. Cain addresses these posts directly, taking accountability for her past actions. “That was my account and they were my words,” she writes. “I was 19 and I was entirely aware of what I was saying and that was why I said it.”

In her final years of high school, she adds, she adopted “extremely progressive and ‘SJW’” views as a rebellion against the “prejudice, hatred, and ignorance” of the culture she grew up in. Then, things swung back the other way. “After moving out of my parents’ house, I fell into a subculture online that prioritised garnering attention at all costs. I flip-flopped again, rejecting all notions of my former ‘cringe SJW’ behaviour... I would have said (and usually did say) anything, about anyone, to gain attention and ultimately just make my friends laugh.”

Anyone online in the 2010s will recognise this inflammatory behaviour – including many of Cain’s posts – as fairly typical of the internet edgelord culture of the time. However, that doesn’t mean it didn’t cause very real hurt to those affected, as Cain goes on to acknowledge. “There’s no place for excuses in this matter,” she writes. “At the end of the day I am white, so while I can take accountability for my actions, there’s no way for me to fully understand the way it feels to be on the receiving end of them. All I can say is that I am truly sorry from the bottom of my heart, to anyone who read it then and to anyone reading it now. Any way you feel about me moving forward is valid.”

That said, Cain also criticises the way her eight-year-old posts were uncovered and circulated. “All of these things resurfacing are not the actions of a well-meaning individual concerned by something they discovered easily and casually on the internet. These are screenshots obtained through extensive digging, hacking, and cooperative effort amongst a group of individuals who do not care who else is hurt by witnessing this media as long as I am ultimately hurt the worst in the end,” she explains, adding that the evidence has been hoarded over several years. “This massive smear campaign has been a long time in the making, waiting for the right moment to be unleashed, and now it finally has.” Many fans (and some critics) of Cain have also pointed out the open transphobia among those sharing and commenting on the accusations.

Cain alleges that the loosely defined group behind the controversy have gone beyond simply sharing screenshots, as well. “Personal accounts of mine have been hacked, my family has been doxxed and harassed, photos of me as a child and intimate details of my past have been passed around for fun,” she claims. “I am an adult and I can take accountability for my actions, but this goes beyond accountability... All they crave is the complete emotional destruction of me as a person.”

Elsewhere in the statement, Cain addresses specific allegations of fetishising incest and female sexual abuse, hand-drawing “child pornography”, and basing promotional materials for Preacher’s Daughter on a real missing poster from the 1990s. Debunking one claim about sexual abuse toward animals, based on a topless photo she took with a dog, she writes: “I can’t believe I’m even addressing this.” Other responses are fairly long and nuanced, making them difficult to excerpt. You can read them in full here.

Ethel Cain ends the statement by stating: “To everyone partaking in this expecting me to address my racist statements in the past, you are completely valid... To everyone partaking in this beyond that, as if it is simply ‘discourse’ or ‘drama’, I hope you are deeply ashamed of yourself. This is none of those things, but instead an attack on me as a person... This is a common tactic used against minorities, specifically trans people in this case, with no goal besides the destruction of an individual.”

Cain is far from the first artist to be criticised for comments they’ve made in the past, of course, and isn’t likely to be the last, as more and more of our early lives (and mistakes) are recorded online. To what degree we should forgive an artist for their past actions and words is, by and large, something we have to decide for ourselves, on a case-by-case basis. Whether Ethel Cain’s fanbase forgives her also remains to be seen, amid the ongoing rollout of her upcoming album Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You.