Kristen Bell Has Stepped In It

One might think that in this year of our Lord, 2025, celebrities would be smarter about their social media posts. This is particularly true of Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard, who have been criticized for posts in the past by judgy social media users. Last year, for instance, they gave Bell a lot of flak for letting her daughters drink non-alcoholic beer because their Dad liked it. She was also judged for letting her kids roam around a theme park unsupervised. In 2021, people took issue with Dax for posting a photo of Bell doing yoga in the yard without any clothes on, which drew some raised eyebrows.

And then, this week, in an anniversary post on Instagram, Kristen quoted Dax saying, “I would never kill you. A lot of men have killed their wives at a certain point. Even though I’m heavily incentivized to kill you, I never would.”

Someone clearly was not thinking through before hitting post on that message. Lord. Expectedly, Bell was called out by many for the tone deaf post. It got so out of hand that Bell had to turn comments off on her Instagram posts.

The timing is not great, either. The dustup on social media that the message kicked up is now even interfering with Bell’s ability to promote the second season of her series Nobody Wants This, which returns to Netflix next week. This morning, Bell was scheduled to appear on the Today show with her co-star Justine Lupe. She did not show, and Lupe had to handle the interview by herself.

No reason was given for her failure to appear, but it’s probably because her publicist has not yet figured out how to respond to a journalist when she’s inevitably asked about the social media post. There aren’t a lot of good responses that don’t start with, “I’m an idiot. What was I thinking?” She should probably workshop a few.