On the latest episode of “Bristol Palin: Life's a Tripp,” the titular single mom warns her 3-year-old that God is watching. But in this case, you're going to have to be the judge.
"Go away, you (bleep)!" a cranky Tripp yells at his mom and Aunt Willow -- and, despite the effort to bleep it out, it sounded like the toddler used an anti-gay slur (in addition to smacking his aunt and telling both women he hated them).
In the face of major backlash from the blogosphere, Bristol took to her blog to insist that her son may have said a bad word, but it wasn't that bad word.
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"As I've said before, I sometimes struggle to raise Tripp," Sarah Palin's eldest daughter wrote Monday. "However, he does NOT use slurs. On the most recent episode of Life's a Tripp, the Huffington Post is reporting that my son said the word 'f----t.'
"This is not true," she continued. "Let me be clear. I'm not proud of what he did say. Sadly, he used a different 'f word.'"
Life's a Tripp showrunner Matt Lutz backs up Bristol's story, telling Gawker (which heard the more patently offensive of two evils) that Tripp said "f--k" and not "f----t."
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Lutz says he was in the room when the word was uttered and he has gone through the raw footage multiple times.
"Lifetime filmed over 12 months (on and off) and they caught a moment on film that would cause any parent to be red in the face," Bristol's statement continued. "Tripp is always surrounded by adults -- around the campfires with cousins and their friends, at the shop with my dad and his snowmachine buddies. He's apparently picked up some language that I'd prefer he not use. On national television or at home.
"I do oppose gay marriage, as I've written about before (and the HuffPo points out). I guess the temptation to label my three year old son is just too great for the lefty papers to resist. However, one of my new Twitter followers made an excellent point. He tweeted that the left tries to hold my three year old son more accountable than their adult spokespeople."
But while Bristol maintains that Tripp dropped a four-letter word, she has traveled the apology route for a family member's use of the other F-word before.
"Willow and I shouldn't have reacted to negative comments about our family. We apologize," she wrote on Facebook in November 2010 after Willow caught heat for calling a former classmate a "f----t" after he bashed their mom's show Sarah Palin's Alaska.
Related content:
- What F-bomb did Bristol Palin's 3-year-old son drop on 'Life's a Tripp'?
- Bristol Palin says no sex until marriage
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