This week, it emerged that three of Lizzo’s former dancers had filed a lawsuit against the performer, alleging that she had engaged in sexual harassment, called inappropriate attention to one dancer’s weight gain, and created a hostile work environment, among other things. The rightful outcry against Lizzo has been swift, despite her recent statement characterizing her former employees’ allegations as false; Beyoncé omitted Lizzo’s name from a live performance of “Break My Soul (The Queens Remix),” and fans have been taking to social media to express their disappointment with the “Truth Hurts” singer.
I obviously don’t know exactly what happened between Lizzo and the plaintiffs, but I am generally of the opinion that a work environment has to be pretty damn bad for its employees to take the extreme risk of going public with their experiences—especially when the boss they’re up against is an internationally famous and beloved musician. Let’s say it now, because it needs saying: Abusive bosses who can’t respect their employees’ humanity deserve to be named and shamed, whether they’re Hollywood studio execs or corporate girlbosses or, yes, singers with a whole lot of public goodwill behind them. The accusations against Lizzo speak for themselves, and no amount of fatphobia or harassment she may have faced in her own career excuses her perpetuating it as an employer.
However, I can’t help but notice that online, certain critiques of Lizzo seem rooted not in horror at her alleged abuse, or concern for her former employees, but in a desire to humble a fat, Black, unapologetically politically vocal woman simply for the sake of doing so. Unabashed racists, fatphobes, and misogynists are reveling in the opportunity to take her down a peg, seemingly without regard for the actual women who filed the lawsuit.
Other reactions have stemmed from the idea that she’s made a career out of promoting body positivity. Of course, that has been a big part of the Lizzo’s brand for years—in 2022, she even launched a size- and gender-inclusive shapewear line, Yitty—but I have to wonder: Did Lizzo intentionally assume that responsibility, or did the media assign it to her, because that was the easiest way to make sense of her presence within a still predominantly white, thin music industry?
I bear some complicity here myself, having interviewed Lizzo about the very topic of body positivity back in 2018. I didn’t come up with the angle, and if I had to do that interview over again, I would have asked her about other things (knowing, as I do now as a fat person myself, that it can be exhausting to talk about your body all the time). But I still contributed to a cultural understanding of Lizzo as a kind of body-posi savior who existed solely to inspire others (as happens far too often to Black women). This kind of media-driven myopia doesn’t excuse anything Lizzo did, but it does partially answer the question of how a supposedly feminist, progressive, fat-affirming public figure could stray so far from her stated ideals. Seductive as it can be to place celebrities like Lizzo on a pedestal, all it does is encourage us to hold hyper-high expectations for individual human beings, instead of dealing with the pervasive systemic issues that continue to plague us all.
Again, Lizzo deserves condemnation for her alleged misbehavior as a boss. But criticism from people who can’t seem to believe that a fat woman could ever be guilty of fatphobia (trust me, we’re not immune from it; unfortunately, nobody is!), or that a Black woman would ever victimize other women of color, is misguided. Power corrupts, as they say, and it often does so regardless of how many marginalized identities one holds. So, perhaps we should all be spending less time alternately idealizing celebrities and vilifying them when they don’t meet our expectations, and more time holding power to account and working to create a music industry (and a world, for that matter) that actually values the safety and health of everyone who works within it.
