Shailene Woodley Just Got to the Bottom of Her Controversial Melania Trump Repost Back in July

In addition to being an actress, Shailene Woodley has long used her platform to raise awareness of causes she holds dear, like global warming and the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. So, when she reposted a statement from Melania Trump the day following former President Donald Trump‘s assassination attempt in July, her followers were left scratching their heads. Did she just show support for him or was it just a mistake?

Now, a couple of months after it happened, the upcoming Three Women star is opening up about what she really meant by it.

“I read it and I was like, ‘This is so beautiful,'” Woodley told Bustle. “I was in circles of people that I deeply respect — friends, colleagues, progressive, very intelligent thinkers, shakers and movers — and many of them were saying, ‘He missed! F—- assassin missed! Maybe it was a setup. Maybe it was a conspiracy.’ I was going, ‘Have we forgotten that two human lives were taken?’ Two people died. That is sad. That is devastating. I could not understand how people were speaking about something with such passion for death.”

In other words, Woodley was moved by Melania’s statement because it urged readers to see her husband as a human, not the politician or the voice of a movement he’d become.

“The core facets of my husband’s life – his human side – were buried below the political machine, ” Melania wrote in the statement. “Donald, the generous and caring man who I have been with through the best of times and the worst of times.”

“I only posted the first page of it, because the second page was more political,” Woodley clarified. “The first page was very much like, ‘Look, underneath the political mask is a man, a grandpa, who comes home to his children, his grandchildren, and plays music. The man underneath that mask is my husband.'”

Even after posting it, it seems the Big Little Lies star had no idea of the implications.

“I posted that letter because I thought it was a beautiful message of human compassion, and then I forgot about it because I have a life and I don’t live for what social media says,” she remembered. “Then a week later, I got a text from a friend that said, ‘Are you OK?’ I Googled my name, because I’m like, ‘Oh f—, what did I say?’ And of course, there were all these news articles about Melania Trump, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that is now this? Hundreds of articles because I posted about a woman saying she’s grateful her husband is alive? Really?'”

The experience, according to Woodley, was the prime example of how posts online can be entirely misconstrued and twisted. “I’m like, damn, I do one thing that someone doesn’t understand — not even [disagrees with], doesn’t understand — and there isn’t a question of, ‘I wonder what she means by that.’ It’s an immediate, ‘Oh, she’s this type of a person,’ which is just a dangerous thing that’s happening in general these days.”

“Instead of being inquisitive to try and dissect and discover, we pigeonhole and cancel,” she said. “Man, it’s so destructive.”

Therefore, Woodley backed away from the internet when she saw all the backlash. “If [who I am] is not coming through in the way that I’m intending, I’m not going to participate on social media,” she said. “I participate in my own ways now that maybe are less public because I want to add to the right noise. I don’t want to add to unnecessary noise.”

Since then, Woodley’s kept any social media postings about important causes or politics to a minimum.

Before you go, click here to see every time Ivanka Trump has tried to distance herself from the Trump family: