Doja Cat Says She Was Just ‘Virtue Signaling’ With Timothée Chalamet Callout: ‘Am I Proud of It? No’

Doja Cat is walking back her comments slamming Timothée Chalamet, after the actor caught flack for saying “no one cares” about opera or ballet.

In a recent TikTok, the rapper took a moment to reflect on her reasons for calling out the actor in the name of the two artforms, concluding, “What I was doing yesterday was virtue signaling, because I wanted to connect, and I knew that Timothée’s goof-up was something that I could leverage in order for people to connect with me and f–k with me.”

“I’ve never been to a ballet,” Doja said in the video. “I’ve never seen an opera. And I took it upon myself yesterday to kind of give it to the man, because there is a culture based around outrage and things like that, and people want to feel like they’re part of something. It’s a need to connect, whether good or bad.”

“And it’s easy,” she continued. “It’s a modern way to garner clicks, likes, approval and all kinds of things like that from people. And so I did that yesterday, and I didn’t really think about why I was doing it. Am I proud of it? No.”

When someone in the comments pointed out that what the Grammy winner had said in her prior video about Chalamet wasn’t necessarily incorrect, she replied, “I’m not saying it was I’m saying I wasn’t coming from a genuine place.”

Doja’s clarification comes shortly after she jumped in on the discourse surrounding the Marty Supreme actor, who quipped during a Variety and CNN town hall a few weeks ago, “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s, like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though, like, no one cares about this anymore.’”

After a clip of his remark began circulating online, countless people started going to bat for the ballet and opera industries. In her original video on the subject, Doja fired off, “Hey, by the way, opera is 400 years old, ballet is 500 years old. Somebody named ‘Tim-ohtay’ Chalamet had the nerve — big guy, by the way — had the nerve to say, on camera, that nobody cares about it.”

“It doesn’t matter if the industry is having a tough time at any time, which a lot of industries have a tough time,” she’d added. “Your industry has a tough time, my industry has a tough time. Doesn’t mean people don’t care about it … There’s still an audience. People give a f–k. You show up in a nice outfit. You sit the f–k down and shut the f–k up. That’s the usual etiquette around those things. Maybe learn something from that.”

But after taking time to reflect, Doja says that she just wanted to be a part of the bandwagon. She also pointed out that Chalamet may not have been entirely wrong, although she thinks he could’ve found a better way to say what he was thinking.

“It just kind of furthers the fact that sometimes I think s–t and then I’m like, ‘Never mind,'” Doja ended the video. “So never mind.”

Watch Doja’s TikTok below.