Singer Chappell Roan has found herself yet again mired in controversy after Brazilian footballer Jorghinho published a damning Instagram takedown of her. The singer allegedly sent her security guard after his stepdaughter to berate her for ‘disrespecting’ and ‘harrassing’ the celeb singer, while the singer claimed that the security guard was not part of her team.
It would be very easy to write off this unexpected celebrity beef as ‘champagne problems’, but it seems that due to its tenuous link to football, even my dad knows about it, making the consequences far further reaching than any casual Chappell Roan fan predicted.
It’s a very ‘he said she said’ situation with Brazilian footballer Jorginho seeming to suggest that Chappell Roan is the rudest person on Earth who’s security guard made his stepdaughter cry, and the singer suggesting that she didn’t do anything wrong.
While it seems like petty celebrity beef, it says a lot about the world we live in at the moment.
Chappell Roan is HOT TO GO (home)
Whether you believe it or not, the HOT TO GO! singer has a fairly negative reputation across social media, with many suggesting she is hostile to the press, and this hostility extends to fan interactions as well.
Even other celebrities have commented on it, with fellow singer Sabrina Carpenter noticing that the Grammy’s red carpet journalists being unusually subdued, mentioning “You guys are so quiet this year […] Chappell really started a movement!” after Chappell yelled expletives at a journalist at a red carpet event the year before.
Roan was also involved in an incident in France where she turned her phone camera on members of the press, demanding boundaries. The singer has called out fans for ‘stalking’ behaviour, and videos have circulated of Roan pointing out people and sending security guards after fans in public areas like airports.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Chappell Roan is desperately in need of some media training, but she is also clearly fed up with her personal space and boundaries being disrespected time and time again. It seems that a lot is expected of (generally female) celebrities when it comes to interacting with fans and the press. As the world of the internet has grown, so too has the world of ‘parasociality’.
Coined by psychologists all the way back in the 1950s, ‘parasocial relationships’ were used to describe the ‘illusion of intimacy’ that a fan feels with a celebrity, like they’re basically your friend. Thanks to social media and the internet, celebs have never felt closer to us.
This has backfired mainly on celebrities, due to fans approaching celebs, their families or their friends online or even in person and expecting a positive interaction with them. From the fan’s perspective, they’re friends. After all, they know everything about them.
From Chappell Roan’s perspective, her job is to write music, perform it and collect the revenue from album sales, but of course, that’s not really it. She has to be ‘on’ all the time, lest she disappoint some young girl who looks up to her, and unfortunately for her, that’s exactly what happened.
Chappell Roan is not just another girl on the subway
Whether the incident happened more like the way the Brazilian footballer said it or more like the way the singer told it, people instantly jumped to Jorginho’s side due to Roan’s previously hostile behaviour.
Now, I’m not defending a grown woman who (allegedly) sent a grown man to berate a young child to the point of tears for looking at her because that would be insane, but it seems like the world had a slightly OTT reaction. If the situation happened the way the singer said it did, then the security guard took it upon himself to berate the girl and her mother for disrespecting boundaries.
The child involved in the incident is the daughter of singer Catherine Harding and actor Jude Law as well as being the stepdaughter of the former Premier League midfielder, so she was no stranger to being around celebs and apparently just smiled at Roan because she was a fan.
Jorginho knew what he was doing when he used his platform to send people after the singer, because he has been in the spotlight much longer than the singer and knows that his audience is mainly middle-aged men who don’t dabble much in female pop singers. In defending his young stepdaughter, he sent an army of men after a woman for being mean. The whole situation ended with the Mayor of Rio De Janeiro, Eduardo Cavaliere, sticking his nose in and claiming that he would ban Chappell Roan from ever performing in the city. I ask you, why?
What ultimately was an interaction between a woman and a girl has led to a singer being banned from a whole city because men got involved.
And you say women are the drama queens…
From my perspective, this looks like a situation which would have passed without much incident if there were no men involved. If the security guard had not taken it upon himself to seek out and berate an 11 year old, it would have just been a moment a young fan smiled at a woman she admired.
If the midfielder had not taken it upon himself to post an Instagram story about the incident, then an army of angry middle-aged men wouldn’t have come after the singer. And if the Mayor of Rio De Janeiro didn’t get involved, then all the Chappell Roan fans of Rio De Janeiro wouldn’t be disappointed.
There’s a lot of discussion about a lot of grown adult’s feelings and the disrespect shown to the boundaries of grown adults, but what of the feelings and disrespected boundaries of the 11-year-old girl who started it all?
The Mayor of Rio de Janeiro has promised her that she will be the guest of honour at Shakira’s Todo Mundo performance on Copacabana in May. As a former 11-year-old girl, I wonder if she’s feeling pretty mortified that her stepdad put all her business in the spotlight, especially telling the whole world she cried.
What’s also notable is that 100% of the people on the Epstein list have not been publicly banned from the city of Rio de Janeiro, but Chappell Roan has, because *checks notes* her security guard was mean to a girl. If I were Eduardo Cavaliere and I were in the habit of randomly banning celebs from my city, then I know exactly who I would begin with.
It seems that this particular incident had too many white knights and not enough damsels in distress.
Clearly no one was listening when the ‘mind your own business’ talk happened, but it’s clear that this situation required zero men and was made worse by having 100% more men than it needed getting involved.
At the end of the day, the poor girl learnt a very important lesson: never meet your heroes, they’ll somehow end up getting banned from a major Brazilian city if you do.
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