Rob Schneider is admitting he wasn’t the father of the year after his daughter Elle King accused him of being “toxic” and sending her to “fat camp” where the kids were served “a slice of turkey and steamed vegetables for every meal.”
In a clip from an interview with Tucker Carlson, the 60-year-oldSaturday Night Live alum apologizes to King, 35, and asks for her forgiveness.
“I just want to tell my daughter: Elle, I love you, and I wish I was the father in my 20s that you needed, and clearly I wasn’t. I hope you can forgive me for my shortcomings,” Schneider says straight to the camera in a clip shared to X. “I love you completely. I love you entirely, and I just want you to be well and happy with you and your beautiful baby, Lucky. I wish you the best. I feel terrible, and I just want you to know that I don’t take anything you say personally.”
The actor and comedian’s apology comes after the Ex’s & Oh’s singer accused her father of being a “toxic” presence in her life during an appearance on Bunnie XO’s Dumb Blonde podcast,
In a teaser for the episode that was shared to TikTok, King lashed out at the Grown Ups star after he criticized members of the drag and LGBTQ community.
“I go for like four or five years without talking to my dad,” King said of Schneider. “I disagree with a lot of the things that he says. You’re talking out of your ass and you’re talking s*** about drag and, you know, anti-gay rights. And it’s like, get f***ed.”
Earlier this summer, Schneider was given the hook in Saskatchewan following a comedy set that included jokes aimed at Justin Trudeau and material that was deemed “transphobic, misogynistic and anti-vax.”
One attendee wrote on Reddit that Schneider ran afoul of the crowd with remarks aimed at Trudeau’s response to COVID-19 and his assessment that the coronavirus pandemic was a “scam-demic.”
“He then moved to transphobia saying that ‘back in my day we liked our women without penises’ and told an anecdote about how he told his son, who is ‘bad at sports’ to say he is a girl to get a better chance,” they continued.
During an appearance at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December, Schneider told the audience that if he “had a dime for every gender, I would have 20 cents.”
Last month, Schneider lambasted a segment of the opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympics that featured drag queens in a tableau that echoed Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
“I am sorry to say to all the world’s greatest athletes, I wish you all the best, but I cannot watch an Olympics that disrespects Christianity and openly celebrates Satan,” Schneider wrote on X. “I sincerely hope these Olympics get the same amount of viewers as CSPAN.”
But King said she doesn’t share her dad’s opinions. “He’s just talking out of his a** and I want to use this opportunity to say that I disagree. I do not agree with what he says,” she said.
Elsewhere in the clip posted to TikTok, King accused her father of forgetting special occasions.
On her 18th birthday, she said that her classmates brought her cupcakes “and I came home and my dad forgot my birthday.”
King was raised by her mother and stepdad in Ohio and didn’t reconnect with Schneider until she was much older. But she said that they had a strained relationship when she was younger.
“If I would ever spend a summer with my dad it would be on a movie set. I would just get lost in the shuffle. If I ever messed up a shot, if I ever was talking, I would get in f***ing trouble,” the four-time Grammy nominee recalled.
King also said that the two frequently fought over her weight and her tattoos.
“I was like a really, really heavy child. My dad sent me to fat camp … and then I got in trouble one year because I sprained my ankle and didn’t lose any weight,” King recounted. “I had already started getting tattooed and it was like 108 degrees. So I had to wear sweaters because my dad was very anti-tattoos or any form of self-expression … Very toxic and very silly.”
When she was starting her career as a musician, King told Bunnie she didn’t look to her dad for any help or showbusiness advice.
“He never helped me; I never wanted his help. He also didn’t have a very good reputation,” she said of her dad. “That was really it. It wasn’t even, like, ‘I’ve got to pave my own way.’ I was like, ‘I don’t want to be associated with him.’ I’m going to get in trouble for saying that, but I don’t really care. He’s just not nice.”
In his conversation with Carlson, Schneider was asked why he didn’t engage in a public war of words with his eldest daughter. “So when your daughter attacks you in public, how hard is it not to … attack back,” Carlson said. “How hard is that?”
“If you love somebody completely, you just — I love her and all I want for her is to be happy and to heal from this,” Schneider replied.