Podcaster Macgyver “MacG” Mukwevho apologized to singer Ari Lennox for his controversial interview.
“I want to sincerely apologise for that question and how it made her feel, and the aftermath. I like to genuinely apologise to Ari or any women I may have offended,” MacG said.
During his interview with Ari, Mac G asked: “Is someone fucking you good right now?”
The singer expressed her discomfort. MacG also faced backlash from a host of celebrities, including Van Lathan, who invited him onto his “Higher Learning” show.
“Definitely, in the beginning, I didn’t see anything wrong with what I said,” he explained. “For me, I was looking in terms of, if it is in the lyric, then I can ask whatever it is. Nothing is off-limits. But what I learnt from this is that it is not about what you ask. It’s how you ask it.
“As someone who prides themselves on their podcast, I do a lot of extensive research before I do any interviews,” he continued.
MacG said the singer’s record label that approached him before the interview and that he was not aware of her music. He added that he had just one hour to prepare for the interview and came across her “Tiny Desk” performance.
“Here is a female artist who sounds sexually liberated. If you watch my podcast, we always delve into sex questions, obviously not that raw,” he explained.
“After the interview, she asked for some stuff to be removed, which I did remove. When she was tweeting that I didn’t remove some of the stuff she asked for, I found that disingenuous. If we were to upload some of the stuff we did remove there would have been more chaos. We sent her team the episode, they approved it and we uploaded it.”
Lathan told MacG that he “depowered” Ari Lennox. Co-host, Rachel Lindsay, asked him why he continued down the line of questioning.
“The reason I kept going was because I thought she forgot about the song. And also we normally do sit-downs with celebrities face to face, it’s never like virtual,” the podcaster insisted. “With virtual, it’s very hard to pick up the vibes of what the person might be feeling and I think if we were doing the episode live, I would have picked up on that and probably would have moved along.”
