Chrisette Michele is still facing backlash after performing at Trump’s inauguration. She’s lost fans, received criticism from Questlove, and Spike Lee even dropped her music from his upcoming Netflix reboot of She’s Got To Have It.
Michele told Billboard that fans and Spike Lee aren’t the only people who’ve been vocal about her decision to perform: “I’ll say that the backlash, I did personally feel, came from members of my extended family who decided that they didn’t want to speak to me anymore or support my family in supporting me.”
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She went on to add that on top of her family disowning her, she didn’t even get a chance to meet Trump because of a last-minute change to her performance. “Originally I was supposed to perform directly after his first speech, and I had done that with Barack Obama before, so I was used to that kind of experience,” she said. “And the woman who organized the event came and told me, ‘Now you’re going to go first and he’s going to go after you.’ I looked her in the eye and said, ‘My family has disowned me. If you decide to Google me, you’ll see that America is writing about me in their newspapers. I’m the black poster child for discord right now, and he’s not going to shake my hand?’ So no, I didn’t get to meet him.”
Still, Michele hopes she will one day get the opportunity to come face-to-face with Trump, adding, “I’d rather be optimistic and think that they’ll come another chance where I can talk to him. But I definitely did take the time enough to meet as many of the 60,000 people in the room as I could that night and begin to exchange information. And there were a lot of people who are excited to sit down and talk, who worked on his campaign.
