Heidi Montag & Spencer Pratt Respond to Backlash Over Receiving Donations After Losing Home in L.A. Fires
Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt are responding to backlash.
Last week, the former The Hills stars announced that they have sadly lost their home in the Pacific Palisades due to the ongoing fires blazing across Southern California.
In a new interview, the couple addressed criticism over accepting donations from fans after losing nearly everything they owned in the fires.
Keep reading to find out more…“We’re very used to negative things, so it’s pretty standard,” Spencer, 41, told Us Weekly. “If people want to send their own money to whoever they want, it’s the equivalent to buying a celebrity’s merch, buying their movie tickets. People can do whatever they want with their own money and, thank God, there’s people who want to support and send us whatever.”
“Nobody’s required to, and it’s not a tax,” he added. “People can say whatever they want and they’re entitled to their opinion. But, all the people that are messaging, they’re asking to send money, they’re asking to do the Amazon wishlist. … These are their choices.”
After losing their home belongings, a few TikTok followers created a GoFundMe campaign on their behalf.
“When this first happened, that first day, they created a GoFundMe on their own and it just kept on doing great and so amazing,” Spencer recalled. “And then they transferred it over to us. We’re so thankful for them doing that and they set up the Amazon wishlist.”
As of right now, fans have already donated over $135,000 to the GoFundMe.
Heidi, 38, further stressed that she and Spencer did not want to ask their fans for donations.
“Then our friends Brandon and Courtney [from TikTok] were like, ‘We don’t care what you say. We know people who want to donate money to you and even if it’s one donation that’s going to help you,’” Heidi said. “So, we had no expectation of anyone donating. I haven’t posted it, but we’ve had so many people wanting to give $5.”
“People are like, ‘Oh, they’re asking for money,’ That’s a coffee for somebody, so somebody bought us a coffee,” Spencer explained. “It’s just in volume, so it may look like all it’s money, but scroll [through and see] it’s just people sending you a latte. There’s some people that it’s a bigger number and I thanked every single person.”
Spencer then theorized that the backlash comes from people falsely believing that all celebrities are extremely wealthy.
“Nobody thought we were rich celebrities until three days ago and it’s getting frustrating. Like if you Google ‘Spencer,’ it literally [says] ‘Broke, no net worth,’” Spencer said. “My net worth on that site that you search for the last 15 years … has been $1,000. So now our house burns down, my parents’ house burns down [and] now we’re rich celebrities, which is infuriating because the media, respectfully, has never called us celebrities [and] never called us rich.”
He added, “It’s this weird disconnect that we’re getting grouped in with actual rich celebrities, which it’s great if we were … but we’re not, people know that.”
Spencer went on to say that it’s just “haters” that are calling him and Heidi out.
“There’s nobody with a brain [who] thinks we’re rich celebrities. It’s like these are just hater people trolling,” Spencer said. “The people [who] are supporting us and have been following our lifestyle on social media, they see we’re not rich celebrities. They see what we do every day. We have been posting our life on Snapchat for the last 11 years, all day long. Our audience knows we’re not rich celebrities, they know we just eat Mexican food and we get organic eggs and they know we do it. We film everything.”
Fans have also pushed Heidi‘s 2010 album Superficial to No. 1 on iTunes to help the couple make more money.