bad taste

Bon Appétit editor caught on tape using gay slur following Confederate flag cake scandal

Major stuff is going down at Bon Appétit. The popular food magazine is dealing with a number of scandals, including one involving its drinks editor, Alex Delany.

This week, Delany issued an apology after a picture of a Confederate flag cake he baked ten years ago resurfaced online.

The photograph was originally shared to Tumblr on July 24, 2010 when Delany was just 17 years old. In the post, he wrote that he made the cake because his best friend was moving to South Carolina.

“To honor her new home, my friends and I felt the need to express some southern heritage in cake form,” he wrote. “Such a glorious cake for such a sad occasion.”

In his apology on Tuesday, Delany explained that he wrote the post when he was a teenager. Still, he called his actions “despicable” and “shameful” said he should have known better, adding that he “cannot apologize intensely enough.”

“I know it doesn’t cut it, but I am truly sorry,” he wrote. “The significance of the failure is not lost on me.”

That may have been the end of it… Until a Vine video of Delany using an antigay slur then surfaced online later that day.

In the video, which was recorded when he was 20, Delany asks “You guys wanna see a bunch of f*ggots lying on top of each other?” before the video cuts to a pile of sticks.

Bon Appétit’s senior food editor Andy Baraghani posted a lengthy statement about the video to his Instagram story, calling the video “hurtful and triggering and all too familiar.”

“There is a vine circulating around the internet in which my colleague, @alex_delany, uses a gay slur. I don’t know how much more hurt I can take at the moment,” Baraghani  wrote.

He continued, “The word takes me back to being bullied and harassed as a kid. To my adult years dealing with the kind of toxic masculinity that I experienced in kitchens and the workforce. It’s not a term I will tolerate. It’s never appropriate.”

But it doesn’t stop there.

Shortly after the Vine video resurfaced, so did a bunch of old tweets and more old Tumblr posts written by Delany.

This time, he was caught making disparaging remarks about women, including joking about having sex with underage girls, complaining about women being too “vanilla” in bed, and trashing gender studies classes.

Twitter has had a lot to say about the matter…

But not everyone feels Delaney should be fired, noting that he was very young at the time and that people change and should be allowed to atone for their mistakes.

Neither Delany nor Bon Appétit have not issued any comment on the Vine video or his past remarks about women.

Related: ‘Flash’ actor Hartley Sawyer fired over racist and homophobic tweets, joking about date rape

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