Bride in viral “royal wedding of lesbian TikTok” video apologizes for racist tweets

The picture-perfect Georgia wedding of Lunden Stallings and Olivia Bennett, two 26-year-old lifestyle influencers, went viral as a video montage of their special day gained 1.8 million views, nearly 300,000 likes, and more than 4,000 comments. Social media users dubbed the upscale event the “royal wedding of lesbian TikTok.”

However, one day after PEOPLE Magazine ran an article about the wedding, web sleuths unearthed Stallings’s racist and xenophobic tweets from 2012 to 2014, which included uses of the n-word and at least one post telling Chinese people to “go back” to their country. Stallings deactivated her Twitter and later apologized in a 10-minute TikTok story alongside Bennett on Tuesday, saying she was “utterly disgusted and ashamed” and adding, “That is not who I am today.”

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The beach party included a tear-inducing gift, a musical performance, and a gay man popping out of a cake.

The social media influencers married at Naylor Hall, a pre-Civil War estate in Roswell, Georgia owned by the manager of a textile mill that made Confederate soldier uniforms. The brides wore designer dresses and veils borrowed from Stallings’ sister and Bennett’s college best friend. The brides made their male relatives and 12 bridesmaids dress in all-white as the couple married in front of 150 friends and family members. The reception featured hand-embroidered napkins as well as a three-tiered blackberry cheesecake, vanilla, and lemon cake.

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The couple — whose “outfits of the day” and “day in the life videos” featuring shopping trips, cooking prep tutorials, and cocktail recipes on social media — told PEOPLE Magazine about how they “accidentally” proposed to each other in 2022 while on the same chartered private boat; how their dogs, Howie and Willow, would be part of their wedding day; and their desire to get pregnant via in vitro fertilization.

Stallings told the publication that she hoped “by showing our life and being in love with each other we … can make people feel an ounce more comfortable about themselves,” adding, “I think that by showing two feminine women in a relationship in the South, I think that it breaks a barrier.”

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A post shared by Lunden Rose Stallings (@lunden.rose)

Barely a day after the shining article about their wedding — and while the couple was on their honeymoon — people uncovered tweets that Stallings posted between the ages of 15 and 17 that contained numerous uses of the n-word ending in the letter “a.” Some of the n-words appeared in her tweets quoting rap lyrics, others appeared in her seeming attempts to imitate African-American vernacular English.

A May 8, 2013 tweet from Stallings read, “[n-words] go behind ya back like nun chucks.” A March 18, 2013 tweet from her said, “he brings that friend around & makes a [n-word] reconsider.” A February 23, 2013 tweet read, “ratchet [n-word] she at it.” In a 2013 Valentine’s Day tweet, Stallings wrote, “me and fake [n-words] don’t get along.”

In a screenshot that has since been deleted from Reddit, Lunden tweeted, “China, go back to ur country & make us some medals!!!”

In a 10-minute video posted to Stallings’ TikTok Stories, she said, “I just want to acknowledge, recognize that I’m completely and utterly disgusted and ashamed and, honestly, embarrassed at how normal it was for me to speak that way on Twitter. That’s nobody else’s fault but mine.”

“I don’t want people to think that I am just sweeping this under the rug or that it’s something I’m not going to address or don’t want to address because I do want to address it,” she added. Bennett sat beside Stallings in the video and added, “It’s so disappointing to see that those things were… written by somebody that I love, but I also know to my heart and core that’s not who you are. I would’ve never married her if that’s who she was today.”

Critics noted that Stallings issued her apology as a TikTok Story, which disappeared from her account within 24 hours rather than making a permanent video post that would remain indefinitely viewable. As of Thursday morning, neither of the women’s social media accounts mentioned the racist tweets.

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A post shared by Lunden Rose Stallings (@lunden.rose)

In a June 2, 2020 Instagram post, Stallings encouraged non-Black social media users to use their platforms to “raise awareness” about racism and to “educate yourself and family, [and] donate” to racial justice organizations.

“As a white person, I will never be able to imagine the feeling of heartache and discrimination that black people face on a daily basis,” Stallings wrote in the post. “I refuse to sit back and not be apart of the change… I love you all and I will never stop fighting for you.”

Her post included a screenshot confirming her donation to the racial justice group Black Lives Matter. Almost all the rest of her Instagram posts before and since the June 2, 2020 post have been of her, her spouse, and her predominantly white friends.

The Daily Beast noted of the couple’s wedding venue, “Naylor Hall did not confirm whether or not its 19th-century owner H.W. Proudfoot was an enslaver or if the property utilized forced laborers.”

One Twitter commenter referred to Stallings as a “milkshake duck,” internet slang for “a person who gains popularity on social media for some positive or charming trait but is later revealed to have a distasteful history or to engage in offensive behavior,” according to Wikipedia.

The slang expression derives from a June 2016 fictional comic by Australian cartoonist Ben Ward in which a “lovely duck that drinks milkshakes” in a viral video is then immediately discovered to be racist.

The Lunden and Olivia milkshake duck came more swiftly than I ever could have imagined

— matilda spider (@save_tillie) October 4, 2023