Hawk Tuah Girl Says She’s Horrified by What Happened With Her Crypto Launch

"It really hurt my feelings when it turned out the way it did."

That Thing

Haliey "Hawk Tuah" Welch seems to be on a redemption tour in the wake of her disastrous crypto project.

In her first major interview since her $HAWK meme coin imploded last fall, the 22-year-old influencer told Vanity Fair — unsurprisingly — that she regrets her role in the scandal.

"I hate that that’s even a thing," the "Talk Tuah" podcaster told VF. "Half of those people that [bought] it were, like, my fans. They trusted me, like, guiding them to it."

"It really hurt my feelings when it turned out the way it did," she continued. "I wish it hadn’t have happened."

The "thing" Welch is referring to, of course, was the alleged pump-and-dump scheme that saw $HAWK reach an incredible $490 million market cap upon its December 4 launch, only to plummet down to nearly nothing within the hour.

After initially defending the sketchy cabal of crypto characters who worked with her on the coin, the "spit on that 'thang'" sensation's only public missives between December and March — a bizarre insistence that "anywho, I'm going to bed" when irked investors were peppering her with questions, and a pledge to fully cooperate with investigators amid a lawsuit from said investors — suggested that she was unaware of the full picture behind her meme coin.

Lessons Learned

In her new interview, Welch was candid about her ignorance surrounding the venture and said she's learned some major lessons from it.

"You got to be really careful what you tie your name to, and you definitely need to know what you’re getting yourself into when you agree to do it," the 22-year-old said. "That’s something I definitely should have done beforehand."

"I don’t know," she added. "It’s a crazy world we live in."

Though Welch told TMZ in late March that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had closed its investigation into the $HAWK coin without pressing any charges against her, it's clear that the specifics of the scandal are still somewhat touchy.

During the VF interview, her publicist, Amy Sisoyev, stepped in when reporter Chris Murphy asked whether she had intentionally "leaked" an episode of her "Talk Tuah" podcast, then on hiatus, to manipulate markets.

"Oh, we can’t speak on that," Sisoyev told VF. "I’m sorry."

More on crypto crises: Trump Tells Justice Department to Just Let Crypto Fraud Slide