YouTuber slammed by fans, loses podcast sponsor following controversial story: 'Makes me so mad'
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After Tana Mongeau ranted about a French wine tour guide on her podcast aptly titled “Cancelled,” reports confirm that one of her sponsors is cutting ties with the show.
Mongeau, who has over 5 million YouTube subscribers and more than 7 million TikTok followers, shared a story in the Aug. 6 episode of her podcast about a day trip she and some friends took while in Paris. In it, Mongeau reveals the first name of the tour guide and the name of a small champagne house, making it easy for listeners to find her.
During the episode, Mongeau prefaced that she had been out drinking until 6 a.m. the morning before the trip, not knowing it was going to be a walking tour. Despite going with a friend who was familiar with the tour, Mongeau assumed she’d be driven around with a glass of wine in her hand at all times.
The tour was intended to be 12 hours long, but Mongeau said that she left after five. At one point, she described putting her headphones on to listen to music during the tour, at which point the guide said she was being “extremely disrespectful.”
“She proceeds to go on a 30-minute tangent about why Veuve Clicquot champagne is called Veuve Clicquot champagne,” Mongeau says in the podcast.
“Shut the f*** up,” co-host Brooke Schofield responds. “You should’ve just told her you already knew [why].”
In describing how the wine tasting went, Mongeau complained about how the tour guide had the group take sips of wine and gargle before explaining different mouthfeels for different wines. When Schofield asked Mongeau if she thought the guide was “trolling” the group, Mongeau, laughing, made a comment about the guide having “a touch” of autism.
Her joke made its way onto r/autism, a subreddit dedicated to the autism community.
“You can’t go diagnosing random strangers with no information on them,” one Redditor wrote in response to the episode. “You’re either autistic or not, you can’t just have a touch. Makes me so mad.”
As the episode progresses, Mongeau starts getting angrier and angrier about the tour guide.
“She’s being such a b**** to me,” Mongeau said about the guide. “She goes on her fiftieth tangent about something no one gives one absolute flying f*** about, and I open my phone to receive a text message. And she turns to me, like a f***ing teacher, and goes, ‘I’ll wait.'”
Mongeau’s retelling of the story escalated, and she started shouting “We paid you!” She then repeatedly said she wanted to physically fight the guide by “curb stomping” her.
“I literally, I absolutely want her dead. At the hands of me,” Mongeau concluded.
Multiple Reddit threads popped up discussing the episode after it aired, with many listeners airing their disappointment in how Mongeau handled what sounded like a straightforward wine tour. In one, a Reddit user slammed Mongeau for the “We paid you” comments.
“The way Tana was saying ‘WE PAID YOU’ the whole time as if that meant the workers have to put up with them complaining the whole time, being on their phones and having their headphones on is insane,” they wrote. “Yes you paid her TO DO HER JOB, and in that transaction there’s also the unspoken rule that the payer has to respect that person’s work and humanity.”
Halfway through the episode, after the story was over, Mongeau read an advertisement for the podcast’s sponsor, Babbel, which is a language-learning platform. While reading the script, Mongeau ad libbed, “And with Babbel I could have told the wine tour lady to shut the f*** up in her native language.”
On Aug. 15, Babbel confirmed to NBC News in an email that the company was no longer working with Mongeau.
“This absolutely does not align with Babbel’s company values,” the email said. “Tana is obviously not a person who understands or celebrates the differences in cultures and we regret to be in any way involved with her.”
Mongeau has not made a public statement about the backlash to the wine tour story. But it’s far from the YouTuber’s first scandal.
The 24-year-old joined YouTube in 2015 while she was still in high school and quickly became popular for her unfiltered, sometimes exaggerated storytime videos.
In 2017, Mongeau apologized after being filmed saying the N-word. The following year, in 2018, is when she tried to host TanaCon — an alternative to VidCon — which was canceled the same day it was supposed to happen and was compared to the Fyre Festival.
Then, in 2020, YouTuber Kahlen Barry accused Mongeau of racism and mistreatment after the two collaborated on a YouTube channel together. Mongeau apologized on Twitter.
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