Chappell Roan, misogynist orgies, and the trap of ignoring 'celebrity news'

Famous women are treated as avatars for all women. Misogynist harassment campaigns affect all women.

I don’t really use my Substack because I lowkey have a lot going on¹, but I have so many thoughts on the latest smear campaign against Chappell Roan that I just thought, what the hell, sure…

I’ll always regret that, at the onset of Amber Heard and Johnny Depp’s defamation trial in 2022, I failed to pay close attention, dismissing it as trivial ‘celebrity news’ before eventually reporting extensively on it. Depp’s legal team didn’t just capitalize on passionate support from raging misogynists and rape apologists—they also capitalized on those who dismissed Heard as a privileged white woman unworthy of public sympathy, and sat idly by while she was treated as a stand-in for all victims, victim-blamed, punished, and quite literally driven out of American society.

Depp’s team relied heavily on all the classic tactics of abusers, like DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim-offender), further mainstreaming these tactics: in the aftermath of the trial, there was a spike in abusers trying to sue their victims for defamation. In at least one case, an abuser assaulted his victim while calling her “Amber Heard.”

Famous women are often treated as avatars for all women. Misogynist harassment campaigns affect all women. How all domestic violence victims and all women are treated in our society is downstream of how we treat the most visible among us.

We are on day, what, now, of the highly suspect online smear campaign against Chappell? ICYMI: some rando soccer player accused Chappell’s security guard—not even her—of denying an autograph and photo to his wife and stepdaughter, setting in motion the now-routine avalanche of social media users calling a prominent lesbian popstar a “bitch” and a “cunt” (derogatory). Chappell and the guard have since made clear this wasn’t even a member of her personal security team and that she didn’t see the child, but to be clear, all of this is irrelevant. This isn’t about how Chappell does or doesn’t treat her fans or paparazzi. There was no online outrage campaign when Bad Bunny grabbed and threw a rude fan’s phone in water. Tom Holland was applauded as a gentleman when he pushed paparazzi out of the way from his fiancee.

The harassment campaign against Chappell has nothing to do with her actual behavior. It is, as usual, just another excuse for the public to participate in an orgy of misogyny—the same phenomenon we encountered with Amber Heard and, more recently, Blake Lively.

Speaking of Heard: Back in 2022, I reported on a terrifying trend of copypasta bots flooding the zone with anti-Amber Heard content. Last year, we learned about a coordinated, astroturfed, online smear campaign against Blake Lively by her boss, Justin Baldoni. We’re now seeing the same with Chappell: BuzzFeed unsurprisingly reports that the accounts behind many of the most viral posts pushing the narrative that Chappell is rude, difficult, mean, entitled, or what have you, are bots or very new social media accounts. Surprise, surprise. Of course, on platforms like Twitter/X, which financially incentivizes outrage-bait and viral smears, it’s unclear whether these are bots or just enterprising misogynists exploiting a system.

There’s another connecting thread between the harassment campaigns against Heard, Lively, and now, Chappell. Those who are smearing them often, ironically, co-opt and weaponize the language of feminism and social justice to justify harassing them. For instance, consider the viral tweets and TikToks claiming Chappell is actually rich (one of her parents is a veterinarian, and this somehow renders her a “nepo baby”), or other posts that claim defending Chappell amounts to “white feminism.” Her liberal critics have long tried to frame her—a queer woman who runs an advocacy group for trans rights, vocally advocates for universal health care, has said “fuck ICE” at concerts, and left her PR company over the founder’s ties to Epstein—as a Republican. All because in 2024, she wouldn’t campaign for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over their outsized role in Israel’s genocide against Gaza.

Consider the anti-Blake Lively posts resurfacing old photos of her with Harvey Weinstein (which, if anything, should raise questions about her safety!), or all the social media users who declared that Lively reminds them of “mean girls” they went to high school with. 1) Grow up. 2) OK. Let’s say Lively is a “mean girl”—that means she deserves to be sexually harassed by her boss?

This is a strategy I’d like to call weaponized irrelevancy. You can call it whatever you want but it is a pattern we encounter over and over.

It is not relevant whether someone is rich, or whether you’d personally like to hang out with them, or whether years ago they were employed by a now-known sexual predator. That’s no excuse to abuse or harass someone. We are seeing people grasp at straws and invent reasons to justify calling women like Chappell a bitch—because, regardless of any behavior from Chappell, or any behavior from any woman, this is what misogynists were already going to do, one way or another. They simply don’t want to see themselves as misogynists, and so they attempt to come up with excuses and justifications. They tell themselves they don’t have an issue with women—they just have an issue with this particular, “difficult” woman. They just coincidentally happen to be participating in yet another misogynistic circlejerk, and instead of introspecting about why that is, they tell themselves that they are in the right, they are even feminist, because Chappell and Lively and Heard are all inherently evil, rich white women, immune to victimhood.

Again: how we treat women with far less power than celebrities is downstream of how we treat celebrity women. If our laws don’t protect women like Blake Lively from workplace sexual harassment, just think about how these laws fail female service workers, domestic workers, and other marginalized women with far less power.

Returning this to Chappell, specifically: one thing you’ll often hear about her is that she’s “entitled,” or she wants it “both ways”—she supposedly wants the rewards of fame but none of the consequences or uncomfortable parts. In reality, it seems all Chappell’s ever really asking for is to not be treated like a zoo animal. This, alone—asking for some semblance of respect as a young woman—has set off far greater backlash than anything we’ve seen in response to artists who actually harm and abuse people, or those who defend abusers.

The mayor of Rio de Janeiro banned Chappell from performing in the city. Her crime? Allegedly being mean, while being a woman. Notably not banned from Rio: Abusers like Chris Brown. As my friend Kat Tenbarge has pointed out, what this really shows us is that deplatforming, banning, or otherwise holding abusers accountable is not actually that difficult—the mayor of Rio had no reservations whatsoever about holding Chappell “accountable.” Our institutions simply don’t want to hold abusers accountable—that’s why every call for an abuser like Chris Brown to be deplatformed is met with handwringing and whining about “cancel culture.” In reality, it is apparently quite easy to ban someone from performing or ban someone from an entire city—but only if they’re a supposedly mean woman.

To frame Chappell as entitled is pure misogyny. And I’ll say it: even if she had been “rude” to a child, even if all the worst narratives anyone has ever come up with are true, she still wouldn’t deserve to be subjected to an online harassment campaign. Everyone has been so fucking weird about her for so long, fans and paparazzi have treated her so inappropriately for so long, she can hardly breathe without inspiring mass backlash—it would be a miracle for someone under these circumstances to always behave with grace and never lash out. It is impossible to not react to the environment you’re in or the treatment you’re facing. Instead, if Chappell is ever less than perfectly pleasant to rude fans or anyone who’s mistreating her, she’s treated as hysterical, irrational, crazy. This is the sort of textbook misogyny that affects all women. It’s also reflective of the tactics of abusers, who frame their victims’ responses to abuse as hysteria.

Large swaths of people have wanted to dislike Chappell from the get-go. They always wanted to dislike a pro-Palestine, outspoken, queer woman who doesn’t cater to patriarchal standards of desirability, who doesn’t perform for men, who stands up for herself. But they don’t want to see themselves as misogynists, so they continually come up with bullshit reasons to justify hating and mistreating her.

Many will participate in this latest public orgy of misogyny, others will idly sit by and dismiss this news cycle as frivolous celebrity gossip amid much more important world affairs. But there’s nothing frivolous about how our patriarchal society, over and over, unlocks new ways to justify harassing and abusing women. There’s nothing frivolous about societal susceptibility to online disinformation, astroturfed smear campaigns, and the classic tactics of abusers to deny women dignity and credibility.

1. Reporting on abortion, every day, for instance, and tweeting a lot and all my books that are coming out but whatever!!!!!!