#116 - The Lizzo Lawsuit

Content Warning: this essay includes discussions of sexual harassment, workplace harassment, and fatphobia.

So, a lawsuit against Lizzo and her team dropped today.

It was brought by several of her former backup dancers who allege sexual harassment, discrimination, and hostile working conditions among other things.

And I just want to say, for anyone thinking that there’s no way Lizzo could be fatphobic because she herself is fat—being fat actually does not prevent you from being fatphobic, hating fat people, or even, thinking you’re better than anyone whose body is bigger than yours.

See, we live in a fatphobic society where literally everything seemingly revolves around weight, and fat people also exist within that society and internalize all of the same messages! So, that’s fun. (It’s often been observed that some of the most acerbic fatphobes are people who used to be fat themselves—super cool!)

So Lizzo, one of the only fat celebrities, has had to shoulder a lot when it comes to fat representation. She has received millions of horrible comments about her body at this point. Her TikTok page is filled with her demonstrating that she works out! she eats vegan! she takes care of herself!

And the tragedy is, I get why being a Good Fattie became her first line of defense. No guys, she isn’t out here binge eating, so she doesn’t deserve to be humiliated about her body! Go yell at a Bad Fattie instead, because maybe they haven’t been shamed enough to motivate a different life course (or whatever fatphobes think they’re doing at any given time)!

Now, why would Lizzo have ever perpetuated the idea that she’s a-ok with being the face of fat representation despite apparently resenting it & the fat dancers she surrounded herself with?

Oh, that’s easy. Branding!

See, Lizzo not only owns an activewear line (it goes up to 6x) she sells shapewear. (She also promoted detox teas and then mocked the backlash to that uh, choice in her lyrics.) She has become the face of body positivity for many people who do not know/follow/care about other fat celebrities/people/influencers. She has made a lot of money selling clothes to fat people who were just so fucking grateful that finally, someone made something even semi-cute in their size.

It has made financial sense for her to assume the role of the Benevolent Face of Fat Representation. It would also make spiritual sense! But alas, it would appear that just because someone is fat it does not necessarily make them better/kinder/less vitriolic towards other fat people.

I, simply put, do not trust celebrities. And part of that isn’t even their fault—I just think that they have weird lives and very few boundaries and everyone around them can’t operate like a normal person because celebs have such an outsized amount of power in any given situation.

At the club, Lizzo allegedly “began inviting cast members to take turns touching the nude performers, catching dildos launched from the performers’ vaginas, and eating bananas protruding from the performers’ vaginas,” the suit says. “Lizzo then turned her attention to Ms. Davis and began pressuring Ms. Davis to touch the breasts of one of the nude women.”

Davis declined, according to the suit, and Lizzo allegedly led a chant goading her to do so. After Davis declined three more times, the chant “grew louder and more strident, demanding a visibly uncomfortable Ms. Davis to engage with the performer.”

When Davis eventually acquiesced and briefly touched the performer, the group burst into laughter, the suit says. Afterward, Lizzo allegedly pressed a member of her security staff to get on stage and began yelling, “take it off,” according to the suit.

“Plaintiffs were aghast with how little regard Lizzo showed for the bodily autonomy of her employees and those around her, especially in the presence of many people whom she employed,” the suit says.

Yeah, so like, being at a strip club with your friends and teasing them or starting a chant or whatever, that’s pretty average behavior I would say. If your friend felt uncomfortable the day after, there is a discussion that can be had between two people who exist on the same level in terms of power structure.

Doing this to/with people who are employees of yours is an entirely different situation!

However, celebrities are often only surrounded by people who stand to make money off of their decisions. There is a tremendous power imbalance at all times. And I think that blurring of the lines/boundaries creates situations exactly like this. Lizzo, in this moment, probably isn’t getting the feedback that would make her aware that her actions were not okay because there is no one around who has any interest in even possibly upsetting her. How is she supposed to grow/know when this is the bubble she’s been in for so long?

Like, it’s very obviously not the victim’s fault (I want to be so fucking clear that I am not in any way excusing these alleged actions). This general lack of feedback is a bug, not a feature of what Celebrity Status does to a person’s brain.

People who intentionally become famous — I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it — are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill. The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease. There is something wrong with them, and when we look at them and learn from them, something goes wrong with us.

Sally Rooney - Beautiful World, Where Are You

I have been haunted by this quote for years.

Because as we move into the most a-religious time in history, we have not removed the culture of worship. We’ve just swapped out the idols.

And these idols, are just people. People with talent, maybe. But people all the same.

Fallible.

It’s why Standom scares me so much—it creates a situation where fans get drafted into the My Fave Is Less Problematic Than Yours war. They can’t intake any negative news or information because that will literally upend their entire personality. It’s gotta be embarrassing to spend years publicly proclaiming your undying love/devotion loudly only to have that person betray the image they had carefully created in order to court fans in the first place.

Like, I don’t think most regular degular people have any sense of how deep standom runs these days, because it happens in corners of the internet most people are smart enough to stay away from. But there are entire swaths of people for whom the Billboard Hot 100 list is personal mortal enemy that they will eventually destroy. And their hatred burns and it’s constant and I really think we gotta start investigating cortisol levels when it comes to standom because I bet it’s actually trackably unhealthy to engage with petty fandom bullshit in such serious ways every single day.

(Like, how many girls literally lost sleep over what they were going to do about Taylor Swift dating that toe sock from The 1975? I! want! numbers!)

Did the celebrities ask for the devotion? Not always! But many enjoy the profits from it and do not care about the potential pitfalls while they’re leaning into it and that is, say it with me, bad!

Being a Backup Dancer is not a glamorous job. Honestly, there are very few dance jobs that even approximate glamour. But these dancers in particular are in an extremely precarious position when it comes to speaking out against their boss because there are very few other professional opportunities for them. Thinner counterparts would have the ability to go on more auditions, to book other gigs. Where are these girls supposed to go? Troye Sivan sure isn’t booking them!

The indignity of the entire situation really is the betrayal they must have felt. (I remember Lizzo putting out the casting call for fat backup dancers—I went home and mentioned it to my ex, passively hoping for encouragement to try out lolollollll.) And that is spiraling to the betrayal felt by all of those who thought that maybe finally we had positive representation of a talented fat person who seemingly went out of her way to promote body positivity and elevate other talented fat people who may otherwise have never received the opportunity to show their skills.

I hope that these dancers get exactly what they deserve in compensation because there is nothing that will make up for what they experienced.

I hope Lizzo isn’t as awful a person as this lawsuit makes her out to be, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she was—not just because Some People Are Bad but because it would make sense to me that her brain is a bit broken by the nature of celebrity and she probably got away with similar shit for years without complaint! And power inhabits us rather than existing from within so often that people become desperate to feel it all the time, to reassure themselves that they are the Most Powerful Person In The Room. And that power is often demonstrated via humiliation, because we live in a culture of: humiliate or be humiliated.

I think the public backlash to this is going to be swift.

Partly because these are seriously fucked up allegations, but moreso because I think there are a lot of people have been waiting for something—anything—to prove that their dislike of Lizzo has nothing to do with her race/size and everything to do with an underlying suspicion that only their amaaaazing intuition could have sniffed out before now.

There is no real insight to gain from those saying “I knew it!” other than that they like attention and Being Right about things. It does nothing to quell the pain of the dancers and staff. It serves as a temporary Good Person badge for them to flout for a day. Until the next news article drops that we will all clamor to Have A Reaction to.