Matt Damon Says He’s Never Called Anyone the ‘F-Slur’ After Criticism for Comments: ‘I Stand With the LGBTQ+ Community’

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Matt Damon said in a recent interview that he stopped using the “f-slur for a homosexual” after a conversation months ago with his daughter.

Speaking with The Sunday Times, Damon said, “I made a joke, months ago, and got a treatise from my daughter. She left the table,. I said, ‘Come on, that’s a joke! I say it in the movie Stuck on You!’ She went to her room and wrote a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous. I said, ‘I retire the f-slur!’ I understood.”

He received a fair amount of criticism for that interview saying he only stopped using the word months ago.

However, in a new statement obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, Damon now says he has “never called anyone ‘f****t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening.”

“I do not use slurs of any kind,” he says.

During a recent interview, I recalled a discussion I had with my daughter where I attempted to contextualize for her the progress that has been made – though by no means completed – since I was growing up in Boston and, as a child, heard the word ‘f*g’ used on the street before I knew what it even referred to. I explained that that word was used constantly and casually and was even a line of dialogue in a movie of mine as recently as 2003; she in turn expressed incredulity that there could ever have been a time where that word was used unthinkingly. To my admiration and pride, she was extremely articulate about the extent to which that word would have been painful to someone in the LGBTQ+ community regardless of how culturally normalized it was. I not only agreed with her but thrilled at her passion, values and desire for social justice,

“Given that open hostility against the LGBTQ+ community is still not uncommon, I understand why my statement led many to assume the worst. To be as clear as I can be, I stand with the LGBTQ+ community,” Damon adds.

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