AnnaLynne McCord has defended the poem, “Imagine,” she wrote for Russian president Vladimir Putin after being slammed on social media for the tone-deaf post.
“Dear Mister President Vladimir Putin,” began McCord, a 34-year-old actor best known for her role in the 90210 reboot from 2008. “I’m so sorry I was not your mother.”
The video posted on Twitter instantly went viral, with more than 23 million views in a single day.
“I know how I could easily have moved in the direction of becoming a dictator myself,” McCord said when asked about her reasons for writing the poem. “If certain circumstances of my life were different, were I a little less bent toward healing and more toward vindication, I could have been a darkly powerful person.”
In the two-minute video shared Thursday, McCord delivered rhyming verses about how she wishes she could have been the Russian leader’s mother. He would have “been so love” and muses about the pain he must have experienced as a child after waking up “in anguish” over “the children of the war.” She empathizes with “children who grow into adults and become people who do historically horrifying things,” she said because she understands “early life trauma.”
McCord added that she hopes to raise awareness about the changes needed within “education systems” to “protect children and stop creating dictators and abusers and enslavers and rapists and bullies,” among other things.
Her poem features lines like “If I was your mother, you would have been so loved, held in the arms of joyous light,” which met mockery as the war escalated.
McCord was one of the several Hollywood figures to speak out about the Russian invasion, with Ukrainian stars such as Regina Spektor, Vera Farminga and Maksim Chmerkovskiy expressing their anger over the violence.
