Opinion | Famous People Don’t Know How to Apologize

Somehow, Mila Kunis’s scripted apology was even worse. She and Mr. Kutcher had weathered criticism for writing letters in support of their former “That ’70s Show” co-star Danny Masterson after he was convicted of rape. Facing her public, she spoke in the awkward cadence people have when they haven’t memorized their lines and don’t know where the emphasis should fall. “The letters were not written to question the legitimacy” — pause — “of the judicial system,” she said, “or the validity” — pause — “of the jury’s ruling.” For an actress, it was not a very convincing performance. Mr. Kutcher, who is her husband, was less awkward in his delivery, but his defense was no more convincing. The letters, he explained, were only “intended for the judge to read,” as if the fact that the couple operated behind the scenes made it OK. They both looked uncomfortable enough to inspire comparisons to a hostage video.

Representative Boebert, thrown out of a theater along with her date for inappropriate behavior, initially dismissed the incident as harmless fun. “I plead guilty to laughing and singing too loud!” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter). But once a video surfaced of her vaping as well as groping and being groped by her date, she backtracked. Blaming the stress of divorce, she said, “I simply fell short of my values” — another variation on “this is not who I am.” As for the awkward fact that her initial response did not even acknowledge the actions she was now asking people to forgive, she said, “It was not my or my campaign’s intention to mislead, but we do understand the nature of how this looks.”

Then there is Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone and a towering figure in popular music. In an interview with The Times, he suggested that women and people of color did not deserve inclusion in his book about rock ’n’ roll masters. That didn’t go well at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, which he helped found. After he was kicked off the board of directors, he apologized, saying the book did not reflect his “appreciation and admiration for myriad totemic, world-changing artists whose music and ideas I revere.”

Saying your book does not reflect your thinking is just a more specialized, even less logical variation on “this is not who I am.”

Not all allegedly misbehaving celebrities make bad apologies. Some don’t apologize at all. Like Ms. Barrymore, Bill Maher recently announced his talk show would resume taping during the writers’ strike. But when he, too, backtracked, he didn’t say he had made a mistake; rather, he said that the writer’s strike could end soon. When four women accused the charismatic provocateur Russell Brand of sexual assault, he denied any fault and claimed to be the victim of a coordinated media attack, which inspired Andrew Tate, Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson — three stooges of the online right, who like to paint people accused of bad behavior as victims of a woke mob — to cheer him on. When Luis Rubiales, the former head of Spain’s football federation, forcibly kissed the player Jenni Hermoso, he followed the lead of Donald Trump, who stubbornly refused to apologize for almost anything, even when pressed by family and his closest staffers. Mr. Rubiales not only failed to offer a convincing apology, he doubled down, defiantly insisting he had done nothing wrong.