Original photo: Lizzo at the the 65th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on Feb. 5, 2023. Photo courtesy The Recording Academy.

Lizzo is upset. That’s fine and normal and human and everything.

The singer got on social media, which is usually a bad idea when you’re having an emotional crisis (trust me), and said she’s tired of the negativity aimed her way.

By the way, Lizzo is a very talented singer who is physically larger than most pop singers. It’s something for which she’s been held up as a role model, and rightly so. We could spend hours discussing the unfair expectations put on women who aren’t famous singers, never mind the ones that tell females making music or acting or doing anything putting them in the public space they need to fit a particular idea of appearance.

It’s difficult enough writing or performing music at a level to satisfy the music industry. It seems its easier for men to look like they were rolled up in a rug and beaten with a muddy stick and still make it big than for a young woman on the large side to ascend the pop ladder.

Unfortunately for Lizzo, there are other circumstances at work. She’s facing a harassment lawsuit from three former dancers, who say she forced them to attend a sex show in Amsterdam and pressured them to engage with the performers.

According to Billboard, they also allege she would have outbursts before shows, accused them of drinking before shows, forced them to re-audition for their jobs, raised concerns about their weight, and generally behaved like the boss from hell. She’s denied all these claims.

Yeah, this is all bad if true. It’s frequently an ugly business, which doesn’t excuse it.

So Lizzo took to social media Friday and said she was damn mad and wasn’t going to take it anymore.

 

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“I’m getting tired of putting up with being dragged by everyone in my life and on the Internet,” she wrote. “All I want is to make music and make people happy and help the world be a little better than how I found it. But I’m starting to feel like the world doesn’t want me in it.”

That’s also perfectly legitimate. She lives in a pressure cooker. Being a performer, contrary to what so many believe, is a lot of hard work, even when you’re not one of the biggest names in the industry. She went on: “I’m constantly up against lies being told about me for clout & views… being the butt of the joke every single time because of how I look… my character being picked apart by people who don’t know me and disrespecting my name. I didn’t sign up for this shit — I QUIT✌️.”

Hold up a second.

There’s one sentence worthy of more scrutiny. It didn’t necessarily nullify her argument, and certainly didn’t rip any legitimacy from her otherwise perfectly normal venting of frustration we hear fairly regularly from the rich and the famous, for whom our sympathy isn’t necessarily misplaced: “I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

Wrong. Absolutely, positively wrong.

This isn’t new. Lizzo turns 36 next month. She grew up with social media (at least in her teens) and knows how vicious people can be. She knew, or had to have known, where the least path to resistance among the trolls would lead.

That doesn’t excuse it. Never. But she did sign up for this shit. Lizzo is a willing public figure. She no doubt worked hard to get where she is. But the public beating up celebrities probably goes back centuries. Celebrities are fair game; even the Supreme Court has weighed in on the rights of people in the public eye versus us regular people.

The New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 ruling saying First Amendment rights of free speech make it hard for public officials to prevail in libel suits. It requires a public official, later amended to public figures, suing for libel to prove that the offending statements were made with the knowledge they were false or with serious subjective doubt about their truth. It’s a stricter standard than is applied to cases brought by ordinary people.

By the way, there’s a couple current Supreme Court judges now questioning the ruling (because of course they are), but anyway… The Supreme Court has also said satire is protected by the First Amendment. In 1988, the court ruled against televangelist Jerry Falwell, about whom Hustler magazine said in a parody ad was a drunk who had sex with his mother in an outhouse. That’s pretty nasty, but they could say it.

All of which has nothing to do with Lizzo’s hurt feelings. No one is saying she can’t have those. She’s busted her tail to get where she is to only sit there and take shit from haters who haven’t done anything courageous their entire lives. That isn’t a defense for being mean and rotten to someone you don’t know (or someone you do).

Celebrities, performers and public officials typically want all the attention on their way up. They actually depend on it, which is why the world has publicists. If and when the public turns on the public figure—and there’s always someone —so many can’t understand why their fame and power can’t make it all go away.

That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have feelings or deserve to be treated badly. But, unless they were a child star, they usually chose this route. Lizzo very much did sign up for it.