The Summer I Turned Pretty star Gavin Casalegno blasted over liking sexist and transphobic posts

By Abby Amoakuh

Published Oct 19, 2023 at 01:41 PM

Reading time: 2 minutes

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Image courtesy of 'The Summer I Turned Pretty'

Twitter, now known as X, never forgets. It is a lesson many celebrities like Hailey Bieber have learned in recent years. Old tweets always seem to find a way of coming back to the surface and creating new waves of controversy. Over the past two days, The Summer I Turned Pretty star Gavin Casalegno has found himself in the all-too familiar cancel hot seat. But what exactly did he do? Here is a full breakdown of the controversy surrounding the star.

Casalegno is a 24-year-old actor from Dallas, Texas. The young actor is best known for his role as bisexual Jeremiah Fisher in the Amazon Prime Video coming-of-age series The Summer I Turned Pretty and for his luscious mane of hair and intoxicating, boyish smile. Casalegno is a certified gen Z heartdrop, so you can imagine the fall from grace that ensued when netizens discovered some pretty unsavoury views in the actor’s likes.

First, it was discovered that Casalegno had liked an anti-vaccination and anti-feminist tweet, which read: “When you find out she is unvaxxed, not a feminist, loves the lord, and aspires to be a wife, mother and a homemaker.” The tweet in question depicted a man with a very enthusiastic reaction beneath the text. This, of course, led to some very visceral reactions by his mainly liberal fanbase.

One TikTok user captioned their video: “It’s sad Gavin has learned nothing from playing Jeremiah because he’d never put up with this… liking posts about not wanting women to be feminists and reducing women’s roles to homemakers is just extremely sexist and dehumanising, there’s nothing defendable about this.”

A little while later, another TikToker discovered that the actor had also liked a video by Jordan  Peterson, a Canadian psychologist who has been under fire for sexism, transphobia and homophobia in the past. Peterson voiced transphobic views in this video, so Casalegno’s apparent agreement with them has been described as vile and shocking.

To top it all off, netizens now also have reason to believe that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Just wait for this one:

X user @ravngirls unearthed the online activity of Gavin’s father, Bryan Casalegno. It showed that papa Casalegno follows far-right figures, such as US Congress Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Andrew Tate…

The user shared: “I remembered last year when Roe v Wade was happening the whole cast posted about it meanwhile Gavin was on his stories posting selfies and reposting follower milestones, that was red flag #1 for me.”

@hugsforcolbs also revealed that the actor had taken to Instagram to publicly show support to Israel during the country’s conflict with Palestine and alledgely liked a post that read: “Israel is under attack by hamas. 50+ terrorists have reportedly entered Israel from Gaza. Please Pray for Israel.”

The war between Israel and Hamas is a highly divisive issue because it is part of a deeply complicated geopolitical conflict that goes back several decades. For this reason, many celebrities have been at the receiving end of backlash for hasty, unresearched and vague comments. This list seems to include Gavin now.

Casalegno hasn’t publicly addressed the controversy at the time of writing this article.