- Heather Morris apologized to "those who felt triggered" after she posted a series of tweets defending her "Glee" costar Mark Salling on Friday.
- Salling had pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography a year before his 2018 suicide.
- "I want to sincerely apologize for the harm I've caused," Morris wrote.
- "Whether you, a friend, a family member has been a victim of pedophilia, I realize my words may have been insensitive to your experience," the actress added.
- After Morris called a fan's image of Salling "offensive," after the fan covered Salling's face with a vomiting face emoji, she subsequently doubled down in a series of tweets.
- Morris' impassioned defense of Salling and her "Glee family" drew plenty of backlash from fans.
"Glee" star Heather Morris is now apologizing to fans who "felt triggered" by her tweets, which passionately defended her late costar Mark Salling, who had pleaded guilty to possesion of child pornography before his 2018 suicide.
"To all those who felt triggered by my message, I want to sincerely apologize for the harm I've caused," Morris wrote in a statement shared to Twitter on Monday.
"Whether you, a friend, a family member has been a victim of pedophilia, I realize my words may have been insensitive to your experience and for that I can't express enough how sorry I am," she added.
The actress appeared to have deleted the tweets in question, which came after a "Glee" fan tweeted out a series of screen grabs from the show's 2010 episode "A Very Glee Christmas" to commemorate the episode's 10th anniversary - even earning a retweet from Kevin McHale, who played Artie.
But Morris, who played Brittany on the show, took issue with the fact that the fan had covered Puck's face, the character that Salling played, with a vomiting-face emoji - an apparent reference to Salling's real-life arrest for possession of child pornography in 2015. The actor would later go on to plead guilty for the charge two years later.
"[T]he vomit on Marks face is offensive," Morris said in a now-deleted reply to McHale's retweet.
After numerous Twitter users called her out over the comment, Morris doubled down in a series of now-deleted tweets posted to her own page on Friday.
"I don't feel the need to ever justify something because some things are better left unsaid," she wrote.
While Morris noted that Salling's possession of child pornography was "unforgivable" for some people, she still urged fans to be respectful of the actor, who committed suicide in 2018 while awaiting sentencing for his possession charge.
"We did not loose [sic] just 2 cast members, we lost 3," Morris continued on Twitter. "And it is SO incredible [sic] tough to have to act like that 3rd one is invisible, because even though his actions are unjustifiable, he was a part of our family at one point and he was mentally SICK."
"Although I don't want to have to say all that, its truthful," the actress wrote in another tweet, concluding her message by sarcastically thanking fans for treating her with "such disrespect and unkindness during a time that I can't get through a day without balling my eyes out at the loss of my entire 'Glee' family."
Morris was, of course, referring to the fact that several other "Glee" cast members have died in the years since the show premiered in 2009. The hit Fox musical-dramedy ran for six seasons before going off the air in 2015.
Cory Monteith, who played quarterback-turned-glee club star, Finn Hudson, on the show, died in 2013 from an overdose of heroin and alcohol. He was 31.
And earlier this year, "Glee" star Naya Rivera accidentally drowned while boating with her young son on California's Lake Piru.
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