Ginger Minj is facing backlash from fans, co-stars and other RuPaul’s Drag Race queens following a wild accusation on Kelly Mantle’s podcast, The Kelly Mantle Show.
In case you missed it, Ginger won the last season of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars in July, her fourth time competing on the show. As this was the tenth season of the spinoff franchise, the format was slightly different; instead of all the queens competing directly against each other with one queen going home each week, there were three groups of six queens who competed separately. The top three queens from each group then came together to compete for the crown.
Before this week, fans and other queens viewed Ginger’s win as questionable at best, especially considering the final LipSync for the Crown against co-star Jorgeous. Contestant Denali spoke out during the episode’s airing, claiming that the show was made to be “Ginger’s bracket” and that the show is “a formatted, biased competition show with lots of subjective judging.”
“At the end of the day, it is literally woven into the fabric of ‘Drag Race’ for it to favour certain individuals,” she explained. “[There are] certain people that RuPaul really likes.”
Now, Ginger is under fire again, this time for allegedly lying in her interview and seemingly playing the victim. The first lie fans caught in her interview was her story about receiving the call to return for ‘All Stars.’
“Going into ‘All Stars 10,’ I had been in the hospital for a long time,” she claimed. “I was really sick; I got COVID, which turned into pneumonia. I was at my heaviest weight […] I was literally as wide as I was tall. [I was] a heavy chain smoker, I was drinking a lot at the time.
“I was just in that hospital and I had really thought I was going to die and I didn’t know if there was anything else for me,” she continued. “So, as I was wallowing in self-pity, just kind of lying there day after day waiting for whatever worse to happen was going to happen, I got the phone call to come back.”
Since winning her season, Ginger has maintained that she was in the hospital when she got the call to come back to the show, but fans have unearthed a pre-season interview with Entertainment Weekly where Ginger had a different story, claiming that she and Denali had been together performing when they received the call, which Denali attested to.
“The funniest thing was … When Denali and I got the call to do it, we were working a cruise together,” Ginger stated. “So both of us at the show that night were just like […] in our head, in our own world.”
While this is a big enough revelation on its own, Ginger’s most controversial comment came whilst playing the name association game on Kelly’s podcast. When asked what she thought when she heard the name of her “All Stars 10” co-star Mistress Isabelle Brooks, Ginger said that Mistress is “a real one.” She went on to elaborate that Mistress is “one of two– Lydia [B. Kollins] is the other one– who, every single week that I was on that television show, would call me or text me, ‘B*tch, you looked great. You were amazing. You deserved this. F**k what people are saying.’ Or, they would call and check up on me to be like, ‘There’s a lot of discourse going on. How are you?’”
She then explained that, “a lot of the girls in-person on ‘All Stars 10’ were very kind to my face, were very supportive of me in the room, to the point where I felt I was in a safe space where I could be vulnerable with them and I could share this experience.”
“Then, once it started airing, they just started one by one defecting and going, ‘Oh, I can get more traction on this post if I trash Ginger or if I say this about her or I’ll wait until next week and then I’ll say this,’” she claimed.
On Tuesday, Mistress– the supposed “real one”– posted a video to Youtube with Jorgeous titled, “Dear Ginger Minj, Please Stop Lying.” In the video, Mistress pulled up her phone records, insisting, “I have never in my life talked to Ginger Minj on the phone a day in my life!”
She went on to revise her statement, admitting that she had texted Ginger once.
“ … she got that right,” Mistress clarified. “I texted her one time […] one singular time on June 20. Friday, June 20, I said, ‘What s**t do these b*tches got to say about you?’ And I put the crown emoji. […] I felt bad that everyone was taking her moment from her!”
Jorgeous went on to spill some behind-the-scenes drama from the finale of ‘All Stars.’ (For those who don’t know, ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ records multiple versions of the finale with different winners to ensure that the queens do not know who truly won the season until the episode airs.)
“There was some tea,” she said. “We [filmed] a double crowning, so she grabbed my hand and she goes, ‘I knew it was going to be us two,’ but she told Bosco the same thing when they were out smoking!”
Bosco then joined the two on the video via FaceTime to reveal– after being questioned by Mistress– that she thinks Ginger is a liar. Mistress also revealed screenshots from Christmas when Bosco removed Ginger from the ‘All Stars’ group chat.
Bosco later posted a message to her Instagram Story directed at Ginger.
“I dunno if you’ll ever get a part on Broadway but I admire your dedication to play the victim,” she wrote.
Other queens from ‘All Stars’ have also responded to the discourse, the first being Daya Betty, who took to social media to dispute Ginger’s claims.
“I call bulls**t, [Ginger Minj],” she wrote. “As if multiple girls from the cast didn’t check in on you. And yes. I [definitely] stopped reaching out. Why? Because EVERY conversation that we had always ended up ONLY being about you.
“Now I don’t fault you for this, because I’m a b*tch that likes to talk about myself too,” she added. “I’ll be the first to admit it. But don’t try to act like no one had [your] back. I think people just started to get tired of your pity party.”
‘Drag Race’ star Acid Betty reposted Daya’s statement to her Instagram Story, along with the caption, “Ditto.”
Cynthia Lee Fontaine– who won the fan-voted Miss Congeniality award on Season 8 of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’– also took to Instagram to express her frustration with Ginger, insisting that she did reach out to Ginger and that “the one who decided to isolate [themselves] from the rest of the cast was YOU.”
“That is not winner behavior,” she added, before encouraging Ginger to “do better.”
Ginger has not responded to the recent drama.
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(Photos: Paramount+; Instagram; YouTube; X; Reddit)
One Response
Congratulations Ginger, you deserved to win, you worked hard and killed it, it was your time to win, you’re a great entertainer you don’t have to be messy, leave that to Mistress Isabell Brooks, she live for that.