Matilda Green has addressed the "embarrassing" racist jokes she and her husband Art Green made in a 2018 interview with Anika Moa after resurfaced footage of the moment began doing the rounds on social media.
A TikTok created by user @nardodarbo features a clip from the TVNZ series Anika Moa Unleashed, in which the host reminds Art about his infamous 'blackface' scandal when he darkened his skin with brown paint and dressed in a traditional Indian outfit at a party in 2015.
"It was more brown face," Art replied when Anika brought up the news story.
"It wasn't full black face and it was also brown body," Matilda agreed, before Art mused: "Actually, technically it was Indian, so would that be yellow face?"
"No, that's Asian!" Matilda and Anika both replied.
In a series of videos uploaded to her Instagram Story on Tuesday, Matilda said the resurfaced footage was "just so embarrassing", insisting "I would never make a joke like that now".
"We were just ignorant and young and stupid and we thought it was funny, but we don't now."
"That's the thing about the internet, past mistakes are around forever," she continued. "I'm just embarrassed and I wish I didn't say it."
Having realised her statement did not include an apology, Matilda returned to add one a short time later in another Story video.
"I realise that I missed the actual apology in my last story. It's not because we're not sorry, I just missed it," she explained. "I wasn't trying to turn myself into a victim or anything."
"Art and I are very sorry and the last thing we'd ever want is for anyone to be hurt by anything that we've said.
Art did not appear in Matilda's videos on Tuesday and, at the time of writing, had not addressed the situation on his own social media channels.
