Pearl uploaded a 7-minute video onto her YouTube page on Thursday, appropriately titled "Nothing You Say Matters Unless the Cameras are Rolling" in reference to comments she made about RuPaul on an episode of Hey Qween recently.
The clip she posted had to do with the fallout from that interview, where she talked about an alleged moment that happened between her and the show's titular star in the early stages of season 7 (she eventually made it to the final 3 alongside Ginger Minj and Violet Chachki).
“I felt like the only way for me to get any way on the show was to build some kind of relationship with the judges,” she said during the interview. “We were filming a segment, just kind of chatting, banter whatever together, and then the camera went down for a moment and I turned to RuPaul and I said ‘Oh my god. I just want to thank you so much. It is such an honor to be here, such a pleasure to meet you. You have no idea, like what this…’, just giving her that whole everything I wanted to say to her.”
“And she turned to me, and she said, ‘nothing you say matters unless that camera is rolling.’,
Pearl claimed. “And that broke my spirit. And that is the reason why I had one foot in, one foot out the entire time on that show. And maybe that’s me being petty, and maybe that’s me thinking that it should have been something that I never should’ve expected it to be. But in that moment, it was so heartbreaking because I idolized her, worshipped her, and I just felt that it was so disrespectful. I had never even been to LA before: it was so Hollywood, rotted, like how could you say that to somebody that is just obsessed with you?”
The interview drew a mixture of criticism and support for Pearl, where some other queens like Laganja Estranja and Gia Gunn have weighed in with their two cents about the ordeal.
Now Pearl has spoken out about it all, where she said that the headlines from the matter are "over exaggerated" and "should be taken with a grain of salt." She claimed that she wasn't trying to "drag" RuPaul or call her names, but simply try to open up about a situation that happened between the two of them that "set the standard for how I behaved on the show."
Pearl also said that she wasn't expecting to go into the interview talking about the matter at all. Hey Qween host Johnny McGovern brought up RuPaul "multiple times" during the chat before she decided to "talk about this moment that I've been holding in for a very long time."
She also hopes that future RPDR contestants don't have the same experience that she went through, and to "know what to expect and not take it as personally I did."
A big reveal that she mentioned during the clip was her claims that a producer of the show called her after the interview aired and said that she wasn't invited to participate in any future All Stars seasons.
Pearl talks about so much more about it all in the clip below. Take a look: