Morgan Wallen Says ‘I Will Never Make an Excuse’ for Using Racial Slur, but ‘I’m Really Not That Guy’

variety.com:

William Earl In his first interview in two years, country superstar Morgan Wallen addressed the controversy that nearly derailed his multimillion-dollar career: His use of the n-word, which was captured on video by a neighbor without his knowledge as he shouted to a friend at the end of a long and possibly inebriated evening.“There’s no excuse.

I’ve never made an excuse. I never will make an excuse,” Wallen told Billboard of using the slur. “I’ve talked to a lot of people, heard stories [about] things that I would have never thought about because I wasn’t the one going through it.

And I think, for me, in my heart I was never that guy that people were portraying me to be, so there was a little bit of like, ‘Damn, I’m kind of actually mad about this a little bit because I know I shouldn’t have said this, but I’m really not that guy.’ I put myself in just such a sh-t spot, you know?

Like, ‘You really messed up here, guy.’ If I was that guy, then I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have apologized. I wouldn’t have done any of that if I really was that guy that people were saying about me.”He’s referencing his subsequent meetings with with several Black leaders, including 300 Elektra Entertainment chairman/CEO Kevin Liles, Universal Music Group executive vp/chief people and inclusion officer Eric Hutcherson and gospel artist Bebe Winans, as well as with the Black Music Action Coalition (BMAC) and other groups in an effort to educate himself.