Karla Sofía Gascón Says She’s “Not a Racist,” Detractors “Already Won” After Backlash to Resurfaced Tweets

Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón is speaking out again in the wake of old, inflammatory tweets being resurfaced amid her best actress Oscar campaign.

Gascón, who is the first openly trans performer to be nominated for best actress, found herself at the center of a firestorm this past week as X (formerly Twitter) users discovered past posts voicing controversial opinions about the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and Muslims in her native Spain.

Gascón apologized for the earlier remarks and then deactivated her X account, saying the latter was done at her family’s request.

“I’m sorry, but I can no longer allow this campaign of hate and misinformation to affect me and my family, so at their request I am closing my account on X,” Gascón said in an exclusive statement to The Hollywood Reporter. “I have been threatened with death, insulted, abused and harassed to the point of exhaustion. I have a wonderful daughter to protect, whom I love madly and who supports me in everything.”

Now, taking to another social media platform, Instagram, Gascón is further reflecting on her experience, apologizing again, defending herself and trying to remain positive as she declares that her detractors have “already won.”

“Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a racist,” Gascón writes in part, in Spanish remarks translated by Google Translate, adding “(you will be surprised when you find out that one of the most important people in my current life and that I love the most is Muslim).” She adds that she’s not “any of the things for which I have been judged and condemned without trial and without option to explain.”

As she’s done before, she highlights how she’s always “fought for a more just society and for a world of freedom, peace and love. I will never support wars, religious extremism or the oppression of races and peoples.”

These remarks echoed some of her recent comments to THR as she explained her decision to deactivate her X account.

“I have defended each and every one of the minorities in this world and supported any event against racism, freedom of religion or homophobia, in the same way that I have criticized the hypocrisy that underlies them, because the first thing I am self-critical of is myself,” she said Friday.

On Instagram Saturday she writes, of those who have highlighted her past posts and used them against her, “I recognize, through tears, that they have already won, they have achieved their objective, to stain my existence with lies or things taken out of context.”

She adds, “They have created posts as if I were insulting even my colleagues, things that I wrote to glorify as if they were criticism, jokes as if they were reality, words that without the background only seem like hate. All as long as I don’t win anything and sink.”

Gascón apologized again “to all those who have felt bad about my way of expressing myself at any stage of my life” and insisted she still had much to learn, including about expressing herself, particularly as she has reached a larger platform through her role in the Oscar-nominated Netflix movie.

She ends on a positive note, recalling how her mother told her, “I don’t care if you win anything, I just want you to be well and not get hurt.”

“Mom, life has put me here to send a message of hope and love in this world, and I am going to fulfill it,” she writes.

Indeed, Gascón has been taking an uplifting approach during awards season, repeatedly insisting, “light will triumph over darkness” amid ongoing attacks on the trans community and President Donald Trump issuing anti-trans executive orders in the early days of his second term.

Though she shared this message when Emilia Pérez won best picture, musical or comedy, at the 2025 Golden Globes, it remains to be seen how the controversy around Gascón’s past tweets will affect Emilia Pérez‘s Oscars chances, even as the film set a record for most nominations ever by a non-English language film, with 13 nods.