‘The Challenge’ star Georgia Harrison is taking heat after photos surfaced of her seemingly in blackface. Her rep says any claims that she’s racist are ‘disgusting.’
British Love Island and current MTV The Challenge star Georgia Harrison, 24, has come under fire after photos of her seemingly wearing blackface have surfaced. The pics were taken at a child’s birthday party in 2014 and she actually documented them on her Instagram at the time, as her black painted face later had silver eyebrows and a mustache added to it. But now some are calling for MTV to fire her over the photos, even though two of her co-stars have come to her defense.
Georgia is on location shooting and hasn’t been able to respond to the furor, but her rep tells PEOPLE, “The claim that Georgia is racist is disgusting and really worrying,” and that they are “in the process of taking legal action for defamation against parties that have labelled [Harrison] racist.”
“The little boy whose birthday it was asked Georgia to have her face painted and he chose to paint it black and silver,” the rep continues. “At no point did Georgia at the time think it would be offensive. Of course now she understands the situation differently and would be horrified to know she’d upset people. However, the bullying campaign that has been launched against Georgia by a couple of angry cast mates from The Challenge isn’t fair.”
A twitter user named Sam wrote “I don’t see how anyone can say Georgia isn’t racist. What she did was 100% blackface, regardless are the reason no one should do it. Also the excuse ‘she is in the UK’ isn’t a valid once, since more people over there are racist. It’s sad to see people still supporting her….” Another person tweeted “First Georgia targets the only two black rookies and now gets caught with SEVERAL pictures of her in black face. Girl you finna get dragged.”
However Georgia has her defenders. Her Love Island UK cast mate Theo Campbell tweeted, “I wasn’t going to say anything as it’s BS to me. But think, love island is 10x bigger over here then the challenge is in the U.S. if anyone thought she was being racist it would have been picked up on it already.”
Georgia’s The Challenge co-star Nicole Bass tweeted, “So everyone @georgiaharisonx was at a 1st birthday face painting party for her best friend stars brothers party, all the kids had face painting on and the kids all painted her face. So my point is that whoever jumped on the band wagon & made this seem like anything else nasty!”
One fan tweeted, “Georgia was at a kids party and the kids were painting their faces, some were white face some were green and she was black, it was Chronicled on her IG,” and another said “I mean black facing is wrong, but let be honest. Why did you all had to bring it up YEARS after Georgia posted it? What reason? If you really had a problem of her posting black face, why didn’t y’all speak up the day it was posted? Ain’t I right?”