Actor Ingo Rademacher has left long-running soap opera "General Hospital" amid a wave of controversy.
The actor has appeared regularly on 25 of the medical drama’s 59 seasons as Jasper "Jax" Jacks since 1996.
After the ABC show announced a vaccine mandate for its cast and crew in October, Rademacher refused to comply and was subsequently dismissed according to a representative for the company.
On Nov. 8, he reposted a meme to his personal Instagram account that featured Winsome Sears, Virginia’s new lieutenant governor, next to Rachel Levine, the recently commissioned four-star admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. The image included the message, “Hello, and welcome to ClownTown, where the dude on the left is an empowering woman, and the woman on the right is a white supremacist."
After a public outcry, Rademacher said on his Instagram Story on Nov. 8 that he should have crossed out the word "dude" from the image before posting it."I do apologize for not crossing out dude, and putting transgender. So I apologize for that," he said. "Because me personally, I wouldn't have written it that way. That was somebody else's post. Again, that's not an excuse. I should have just crossed it out. While it's not okay to call a black woman, a white supremacist and I don't think … either that it's okay to call a transgender an empowered woman because where does that leave women?
"Think about that for a second. Where does that leave women? Women have fought so hard to get on a level playing field with men. They weren't allowed to do anything back in the day. They were nothing."
The West Germany-born actor said he shared the post because he wanted to “highlight the hypocrisy of the left-wing media.”
The actor had previously used his social media platforms to speak out against vaccine mandates. On Instagram on Nov. 7, he said he would “stand with you to fight for medical freedom.”
The show acknowledged the controversy on Twitter on Nov. 10, writing “General Hospital stands in solidarity with the trans community.”
In addition to his time on the soap opera, Rademacher has appeared on “Hawaii Five-O” and competed on “Dancing with the Stars.”
