Chrisette Michele is still having to defend her decision to sing at Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year.
Michele appeared on The Breakfast Club on Thursday morning to discuss, among other things, a series of Instagram posts where she revealed that she was suicidal, had had a miscarriage, and was dropped from her label, all in one year. A lot of her grief, she revealed, stemmed from her inauguration performance for President Donald Trump in January.
“The stress of being an artist sometimes is a lot,” she said. “But the stress of Trump becoming president, and the stress of me being associated with someone who I don’t support, and then the stress of the hatred online and then the stress of me never wanting to sing again… I think that had a lot to do with the stress on my body.”
“I regret everything that happened,” she said about performing for Trump. “I think that was a bad choice.”
In addition to apologizing repeatedly for the mistake, Michele explains why she thought it was a good idea at the time —and says it had nothing to do with money.
“My thing is with people like Questlove who said, ‘You needed the money.’ Questlove has my phone number. If I needed the money why didn’t you call me and say, ‘Yo sis, are you good?’ I just came off a 32-city tour before that and was finishing an 18-city tour after that. I’ve never been strapped for performances. And this $750k and $250k [for the inauguration performance], these were all numbers that people made up.”
“I thought by saying, ‘Everything was going to be alright,’ [with the performance] was the right thing to say.”
“And I was wrong.”