Jonathan Van Ness Addresses ‘Queer Eye’ Rage Issue Allegations

Jonathan Van Ness, star of Netflix’s Queer Eye, has addressed allegations made in March by Rolling Stone that they had serious rage issues on the set of Queer Eye.

On an episode of the podcast Table Manners with Lennie and Jessie Ware, Van Ness denied the allegations and said that they knew about the report long before publication.

“I went from bankruptcy to then, ‘Oh, there ’s someone who’s going to write an investigative takedown, like exposé piece about you that isn’t really based in reality, but can certainly have a lot of things taken out of context to like make you look as bad as possible,’” they said.

However, they also added: “Even though I do believe that that article was overwhelmingly untrue and done in bad faith, there have obviously been times throughout my career where you’re stressed out or I may have been elbow deep in highlights and was like, no, I can’t talk about that right now.

“I know that there were times where I could have been better. But I think also being a survivor of abuse and talking about everything that I’ve talked about, I internalized it so badly. I was like, oh my God, is it true? Like, am I really this bad person?”

Claims against Jonathan Van Ness from Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone’s March article held claims that working for Van Ness involved “walking on eggshells” to avoid an outburst from the hairstylist, with one source saying there would be an incident at least once a day. Anonymous sources on the show described them in a number of ways, including “emotionally abusive” and “a nightmare.”

The article also claimed that Van Ness and Tan France had “campaigned” with Antoni Porowski to replace long-time Fab Five member Bobby Berk with Jeremiah Brent (though Brent attempted to dismiss these rumours).

Though Netflix warned them that the article wasn’t “based in reality”, they took the whole experience as a learning opportunity. “It forced me to just really learn how to slow down, disengage and then really love myself,” Van Ness said.

/”But sometimes loving yourself just looks like feeling your feelings. And I just had to be sad for a minute, and kind of withdraw and go into myself and feel it. And then once I got done feeling it, I was able to get the language to be able to say what I just said. It just kind of paralyzed me.”