Ice Spice revealed where she currently stands with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy seven months after he made offensive comments about her. In February, Matty, 34, appeared on The Adam Freidland Show podcast and laughed as the hosts mocked several accents and flung jokes about Ice, 23. The British musician apologized to the rapper at one of his concerts in April, but then he partly defended what he said in an interview with The New Yorker the following month, after Ice and Matty’s then-rumored girlfriend, Taylor Swift, released their collaboration “Karma.”
In an interview with Variety published September 28, Ice revealed that Matty has apologized to her “a bunch of times” for the controversy.
“I had heard that little podcast or whatever, I was so confused,” she explained. “Because I heard ‘chubby Chinese lady’ or some shit like that, and I’m like, ‘Huh? What does that even mean?’ First of all, I’m thick. What do you mean Chinese? What? But then they apologized or whatever. And the whole time, I didn’t really care,” Ice continued. “But that’s funny because I saw him at the Jean Paul Gaultier party a couple days ago, and he was like, ‘Hey, you OK?’ and I’m like, ‘Of course.’ He apologized to me a bunch of times. We’re good.”
The first time Matty addressed the Ice Spice drama was during a New Zealand concert in April. He told the crowd in fan videos that circulated on the internet, “Sorry if I’ve offended you, Ice Spice. I’m sorry. It’s not because I’m annoyed that me being joking got misconstrued. It’s ’cause I don’t want Ice Spice to think that I’m a d***. I love you, Ice Spice. It’s OK for me to be, like, a trickster or whatever, but I don’t want to be perceived as mean-hearted.” Matty further professed that he is “genuinely sorry” for the comments because “I f****** love her.”
But in an interview with The New Yorker published May 31, Matty was much less apologetic for the controversy. When asked if he was “baiting” fans by taking part in mocking Ice and her ethnicity, he admitted, “A little bit. But it doesn’t actually matter. Nobody is sitting there at night slumped at their computer, and their boyfriend comes over and goes, ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ and they go, ‘It’s just this thing with Matt Healy.’ That doesn’t happen.”
The “Robbers” singer also said that anyone who felt hurt by the comments was a “liar” as he pushed back against the pain he caused. “You’re either lying that you are hurt, or you’re a bit mental for being hurt. It’s just people going, ‘Oh, there’s a bad thing over there, let me get as close to it as possible so you can see how good I am,’ ” he said. “And I kind of want them to do that, because they’re demonstrating something so base level.”
Matty was romantically linked to Taylor, 33, during the time of the Ice Spice controversy. They broke up in early June, according to various reports at the time, and Taylor is now pursuing Kansas City Chiefs tight-end Travis Kelce, 33. Taylor and Ice were recently seated next to each other at the MTV Video Music Awards.