Karla Sofía Gascón has described herself as “less racist than Gandhi” and insisted “no one has to forgive me for anything” as she returns to the public eye after the emergence of offensive social media posts widely thought to have torpedoed the Oscar hopes of her film Emilia Pérez.

The Spanish performer, who became the first transgender woman to be nominated for a best actress Oscar, was dropped from the film’s campaigning materials by its studio, Netflix, and criticised by colleagues and prominent politicians after the series of old racist and Islamophobic tweets came to light.

Ten days after revealing that the pain of the subsequent backlash had led her to “contemplate the unthinkable”, Gascón was on more bullish form as she appeared in Madrid on Thursday to promote her biographical book Lo que queda de mi (What’s Left of Me).

Asked whether she felt she had been forgiven for her tweets, the actor told journalists: “No one has to forgive me for anything. If anyone feels offended by things I may have done in my life, let them come and tell me.”

She also suggested she may have been the victim of a deliberate smear campaign, adding that it was odd that someone had pored over tweets that went all the way back to 2016.

“It’s clear that there was a campaign against me and that they kept going until they got what they were after,” she said.

She said she had been the victim of hypocrisy, prejudice and a rush to judgment.

“They’ve said that I’m far-right or racist or whatever,” she added, in remarks reported by El Mundo. “But if there’s one thing I’ve done all my life, it’s that I’ve been against all this. When I was young, I used to fight with skinheads … When someone comes up to me and I ask them: ‘But what is it about me that offends you?’, no one can come up with anything or tell me anything.”

Gascón told the reporters that she was “less racist than Gandhi” – despite the fact, she said, that people had tried to portray her as deeply prejudiced during what she termed “a social media massacre”.

The actor said that while she had “enormous respect for Muslim people”, she had none when it came to “fanaticism, terrorism and all the awful things that are done in the name of God or religion”.

She also dismissed suggestions that her old tweets had led to her losing a contract with a Spanish publisher. “To tell the truth, there was no contract between me and that publisher,” she said. “They said what they said, but there was never anything.”

Asked whether she regretted anything and whether she would do the same thing again, Gascón said: “Life always puts us into difficult places so that we can learn. And you always learn from mistakes.”