A YouTube influencer is finding out the hard way that publicly slamming a French wine tour, including by calling for a wine expert's death, isn't the way to hold onto sponsors. On her Aug. 6 Cancelled podcast, Tana Mongeau got into the weeds on her recent visit to France, which included a trip to a Champagne house in an unidentified town. On that tour, the 25-year-old says she wasn't feeling so hot due to being hungover and having stayed up until dawn the night before, and that she hadn't known the wine tour was going to be on foot. Mongeau also didn't love that there wasn't as much wine tasting on the tour as she would've liked.
"I don't want to learn about fertilization of grass in the middle of France in a town of a population of 300 at 8:34am after I've just walked a mile and a half and there's yet to be a glass of wine in my hand," she griped. But it was one other comment in particular that raised the biggest red flag, directed toward oenophile Cynthia Coutu, who was leading the tour. "I literally, I absolutely want her dead. At the hands of me," Mongeau said. To make matters worse, the influencer then inserted her anger over the situation into an ad for a sponsor she read out loud on the air. "With Babbel I could have told Cynthia the wine tour lady to shut the f--- up in her native language," Mongeau said, referencing the e-language platform, per NBC.
She didn't mention Cynthia's last name, but NBC figured out it was Coutu based on the hints Mongeau dropped. Both Coutu and Babbel are now pushing back. Coutu notes that whoever booked Mongeau's tour was given a full itinerary—including a mention that participants should "wear comfortable walking shoes"—and that Mongeau was "extremely disrespectful" during the tour, including donning earbuds to listen to music. Coutu adds she started getting "strange" messages and bad reviews online after Mongeau's podcast, which is when she reported Mongeau's death threats to police.
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A rep from Babbel also says they'll be vetting sponsorships more carefully from now on. "This absolutely does not align with Babbel's company values," Matt Horsburgh told NBC in an email. "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." How badly will this hurt Mongeau? Last month, Forbes posted a piece on her in which it claimed she may be "impossible to cancel." (More influencer stories.)
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