Marie Claire Editor Apologizes for 'Mike & Molly' Attack Blog

Marie Claire editor in chief Joanna Coles is apologizing for a blog entitled “Should Fatties Get a Room? (Even on TV)” on her mag's website railing against the overweight characters on CBS' Mike & Molly.

"Maura Kelly is a very provocative blogger,” Coles told Fashionista.com Wednesday. “She was an anorexic herself and this is a subject she feels very strongly about.”

Coles said the writer updated her post to appear less like an "insensitive… bully" after the magazine received 28,000 complaint emails. Still Coles, who has not seen the show either, adds, "I’m concerned about a show that makes fun of large people." (Its star, Melissa McCarthy, who plays Molly, told the Chicago Tribune in August, "I didn’t take it as making fun at all, and I think I’m really sensitive to that stuff." Show creator Chuck Lorre told THR last month the show is about "real people… people in most sitcoms live very unrealistic lives." )

In the original post, Kelly wrote, "Yes, I think I'd be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other ... because I'd be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room," and a preemptive defense that some of her best friends "could be called plump."

Later, she added an apology that read, "Believe it or not, I never wanted anyone to feel bullied or ashamed after reading this, and I sorely regret that it upset people so much. A lot of what I said was unnecessary; it wasn't productive, either."

She blamed her "extreme reaction" on her own anorexia fight.