Elle King ‘Was Not Trying to Hurt’ Dad Rob Schneider with Recent Comments About Strained Relationship (Exclusive)

Elle King knows family can be complicated.

King recently opened up about her strained relationship with her father , comedian Rob Schneider. On the Dumb Blonde podcast, the "Ex's & Oh's" singer told host Bunnie Xo that Schneider had sent her to "fat camp" when she was a kid, that he was absent and forgot her birthdays as a child and that she disagrees with his views on LGBTQ+ rights. After the podcast dropped, Schneider, 60, publicly apologized to King while speaking with conservative media personality Tucker Carlson.

"I never in a million years thought that that was going to go viral. I was just speaking about my childhood and about my truth," King, 35, tells PEOPLE. "I was not trying to hurt him."

Despite the internet chatter that came with her comments, King doesn't regret speaking her mind.

"A lot of people said, 'How could she say that about her family?' and 'Everything needs to be behind closed doors.' No, it doesn't. Sometimes you have to just say things and get them off your chest so that you don't have to carry it for the rest of your life," she says. "But ultimately, I think an apology on Tucker Carlson is like a double negative, right? Means nothing."

And King is happy to have sparked conversations about allyship.

"What I will say is the best thing that came from that is that my incredible LGBTQ+ community knows that they have an ally in me," she says. "And if that's the biggest thing to come out of that platform, then I would've done it 10 more f-ing times because I am an ally, they have one in me, and I'm grateful."

King will release her next single, "High Road," on Friday, Sept. 20.

"Since last year, if anything was going wrong or something pissed me off, my manager would say, 'High Road 2024,' and that was our theme of like, 'Take the f-ing high road, bitch. Be the person that you would hope that you could be through any situation,'" the Grammy-nominated star says of the country ballad's inspiration. "And it's just been a phrase that we've used."

The "Drunk (and I Don't Want to Go Home)" singer was born in Los Angeles but was raised by her mom, model-turned-doula London King, and her stepdad Justin in Ohio.

"I was the chubby girl with a dad that didn't visit very often, and everybody made fun of me and were mean to me about it," King told PEOPLE of her childhood in 2023.

King added that she was estranged from her dad for a time, and when she released her 2012 self-titled EP, "he wasn't even in my life. He got married and had a kid, and we weren't even talking," King says of Schneider, who shares daughters Miranda, 10, and Madeline, 6, with his third wife Patricia.