There’s nothing like a flurry of new rumors to make someone address old mistakes. Alix Earle, the TikTok influencer behind “Get Ready With Me,” said this week that she “deeply regrets” posting racial slurs against Black people multiple times a decade ago.

“I take responsibility and want to be clear that I was 13 years old and did not understand the deeply offensive meaning behind that word,” she wrote in her TikTok and Instagram stories earlier this week, which have since expired. “That is not an excuse to use that word in any context or at any age. That is absolutely not how I speak or what I stand for.”

The 23-year-old social media star said she was advised not to respond to something she wrote on the website Ask.fm as a teenager, but that she now regrets it. Screenshots of Earle using the n-word — without the hard R, TMZ noted — in 2014 originally resurfaced on Reddit a year or two ago, which is presumably around the time she received that advice. More recently, found on the AlixEarleSnark subreddit: a post from eight days ago in which she questioned why the influencer would post photos of black friends when she “wouldn’t even respond to the racist tweets” (which weren’t tweets).

Earle said Monday that her silence on the subject had allowed others to “fill the void” with untrue rumors.

“One rumor in particular is that I have attempted to trademark my old posts, which is absolutely ridiculous and untrue. Another is that a brand has announced that they will no longer be working with me, even though we have never spoken to them about a partnership in any capacity,” she wrote.

She also regretted that her actions in 2014 “made people believe that I had prejudices in my heart.”

Reactions to Earle’s silence and subsequent apology seemed mixed. Some pointed to her age at the time, while others pointed out that at 13, they already knew it was inappropriate for white people to use that word.

“Everyone keeps saying she’s going to keep ignoring it because the majority of her followers are just like her,” one Instagram user posted on August 12. “She doesn’t care – about her POC followers, they don’t look like her and her best friends.”

“Seriously… it sucks that you can’t take responsibility,” another responded the same day.

After Earle posted her apology, the backlash developed. One commenter was upset that she hadn’t made the statement in a post on her grids, where they would have remained, instead of in her stories, which have since expired.

“ONLY A STORY POST?!?!….. THAT’S CRAZY,” wrote one TikTok user.

“As a public figure you should have addressed this issue when it came out,” another commenter wrote on one of Earle’s Instagram posts. “The lack of accountability speaks volumes. Okay let’s be honest this happened when you were 13. You don’t have to apologize but you built your platform on ‘sincerity’ and you haven’t been that in the past few days. Moving forward we all know you’ll be careful but hopefully this becomes a lesson and you try not to capitalize on your ‘naivety.'”

Earle, who is in a relationship with NFL wide receiver Braxton Berrios of the Miami Dolphins and has 7.1 million followers and a billion likes on TikTok, seemed ready to take the next step.

“My platform has always been about positivity, entertainment, and uplifting others, and will continue to be so,” she wrote in her statement. “I sincerely apologize to those I have offended.”

Her Instagram stories on Tuesday and Wednesday, on the other hand, were about soup.