Piers Morgan slammed Khloe Kardashian's efforts to remove an unedited photo from the internet.- Morgan said the controversy revealed the Kardashian family's "scam."
- He said the Kardashians were a "bunch of talentless fame-hungry greedy and hypocritical wastrels."
Piers Morgan described Khloé Kardashian's attempts to have an unedited photo of herself removed from the internet as "frankly tragic" in his latest column for the Daily Mail.
Writing in the tabloid, Morgan said the photograph - which appears to be free of any airbrushing techniques and features Kardashian standing by a pool in a leopard-print bikini - revealed the "scam" he said the Kardashian family had been running for years.
"By comparison to all her heavily enhanced, carefully-staged glamour publicity photos, her waistline is significantly less defined, her curves less dramatic and her skin not so impossibly smooth. It's Khloé unvarnished, flaws and all. And the photo was utterly horrifying," he wrote.
"Not to me, I hasten to add. I thought she looked as refreshingly normal as I've ever seen any of the Kardashians. No, it was utterly horrifying to HER."
He continued: "With one carelessly released genuine photo, the scam's been blown. Khloé Kardashian's not some wondrously sculpted Venus-like goddess after all, she's just a regular woman with regular looks and a regular body shape. No shame in that - at all - yet she's made herself very rich by pretending to be something very different and very special. And the moment that ruthlessly protected mask slipped - she went berserk."
Later in the article, Morgan described the Kardashian family as a "bunch of talentless fame-hungry greedy and hypocritical wastrels" and wrote that the photo issue was important because young fans often set out to emulate her looks.
"The reason the Khloé fakery matters is that so many impressionable young girls and women strive to look like the way they think the Kardashians look, from recklessly starving themselves to get the same fake waists, to paying plastic surgeons to irreparably nip and tuck their faces," he wrote. "Their desperation to emulate their fraudulent idols causes huge mental health issues including anxiety, depression, and worse."
He added: "It's frankly tragic to see how terrified Khloé Kardashian was by the thought people might know what she really looks like."
It was first reported Monday by Page Six that the photograph of Kardashian was being removed from social-media sites following threats of legal action from her representatives. In response, a Kardashian representative said the image was taken during a private family gathering and was accidentally posted to social media without permission by an assistant.
Late Wednesday evening, Kardashian responded to the reports for the first time with a post on Instagram in which she defended the efforts to have the photo removed and talked about her struggles with body image.
"As someone who has struggled with body image her whole life, when someone takes a photo of you that isn't flattering in bad lighting or doesn't capture your body the way it is after working so hard to get it to this point - and then shares it to the world - you should have every right to ask for it to not be shared - regardless of who you are," she said.