“We’re all human, right?”: New Masterchef Judge Melissa Leong defends old negative tweets on The Project
One of the new Masterchef Australia judges has been forced to defend herself on The Project last night over negative tweets she made in the past about the show.
Not long after the announcement yesterday of the new judges, who are Melissa Leong, Andy Allen and Jock Zonfrillo, tweets from 2012 of Leong’s resurfaced.
They weren’t exactly complimentary about the show she is now the face of.
One of Leong’s tweets from 2012 said:
Another tweet was a retweet of someone’s comment about Masterchef, which said:
The new trio of Masterchef judges appeared on The Project and host Waleed Aly brought up the elephant in the room.
“Now Melissa, I’m sorry to have to do this, but there are some questions that simply have to be asked,” Aly said.
“You’ve tweeted in the past and some of your old tweets have surfaced today … my first question is: Why didn’t you find the delete button?”
Leong didn’t hold back in her response.
“We’re all human, right?” Leong, a successful food and travel writer, said.
“We all have perspectives on things that change over time and so, you know, why should I scrub all my social media clean of former opinions that I’ve had?
“I may not believe the same things I did before but I also don’t believe in presenting a sanitised version of myself that’s highly edited because that’s not who I am.”
At the time of writing, the posts appear to have been deleted.
There will be a lot of pressure on the new three judges when season 12 of Masterchef starts next year, as many fans were fond of the old judges, Matt Preston, Gary Mehigan and George Calombaris.