Rising country star Morgan Wallen has had his name in the spotlight for reasons other than his music in the recent months. Now Wallen finds himself apologizing for his mistakes.

    Stereogum  reported  the start of the Morgan Wallen scandal goes back to October of 2020. Wallen attended the Crimson Tide football game against Texas A&M. He then went to surrounding bars in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

     Wallen was videoed partying at bars in Tuscaloosa without a mask on with several other people. During this escapade he was found kissing a handful of girls, who were presumed to be girls from the University of Alabama. The party went on for the entirety of the weekend.  

    Senior Tori Simms says, “he should be able to go out and have a good time but he does have a reputation to uphold so [she] feels that he should be better about what he is doing and who he is doing things with because he is so well known.”

     Fast forward to February of 2021, where a video surfaced of Wallen saying the N-word.  TMZ shares that Wallen returned home on a Sunday night after a night out with his friends. As he’s walking up to his home, he says the racial slur along with some other profanities. 

     In the video he was with a group of his friends, being loud and obnoxious in the late hours of the evening. TMZ says their rambunctious actions aggravated neighbors and that’s when one neighbor started recording the events.  The morning after, on a Monday, the neighbor recorded a video of Wallen escorting a woman out of his house. 

      Junior Lexi Gainey says, “I believe it’s an invasion of privacy for Morgan Wallen’s neighbor to record him [on his own property] while he was drunk having a conversation with his friends.”

     Gainey adds that “it’s not fair that a lot of rappers have said the N-word in their music but haven’t received any backlash for using it.”

     Wallen had recently dropped his second studio album, Dangerous: The Double Album, featuring around 30 songs. According to Billboard, the album hit the top of the charts for at least two weeks straight. 

     After the N-word incident the country music industry quickly dropped support for the country star, states The Rolling Stone. His contract with Big Loud Records is indefinitely suspended and his music is being pulled from radios and playlists. 

     The Rolling Stone continues with how the country star’s fanbase didn’t stop supporting the artist. His sales increased by 1,220 percent on Wednesday, after the video got out. Despite being removed from the radio and playlists his streams stayed the same.

     Many radio stations announced they’d be removing his songs from their airwaves, such as iHeartRadio and SiriusXM states The Rolling Stone. Senior Tori Simms believes “what he did was wrong but the actions taken against him were unnecessary.”

     Senior Riley Stem says “I think it was wrong for him to do all he did, but we are humans, and we make mistakes. I don’t think he should be canceled; he will grow and learn.”

     On February 10, Morgan Wallen released a video onto his Instagram account announcing his apology. In this he starts by saying he’s “long overdue to make a statement about [his] last incident.” During his apology he repeats how he “isn’t proud.” 

    In the video he talks of how many people he’s let down, and how he needed to apologize to those people first. Wallen claims the kindness from the black organizations that reached out to him “inspired him to dig deeper.” He shares he’s aware of “how [his] words matter, a word can truly hurt a person.”

     Morgan Wallen’s full apology is on his Instagram account, @morganwallen.