I Don’t Care That You Never Liked That Abusive Celebrity

Over the past seven years that I’ve been writing about pop culture professionally, the entertainment industry has experienced immense change. I began my career the first year of the Trump administration and mere months before #MeToo unfolded. Things we never thought would happen did, and long-held assumptions about power and accountability were turned on their heads. We still live in the shadows of that social movement and all it inspired (including the well-funded backlash to it), and we’re seeing how the back-and-forth of progress plays out in real-time. These past few weeks have seen another oft-whispered-about titan of entertainment, Sean Combs, be arrested on federal charges, with a rap sheet that includes near-countless allegations of rape, assault, trafficking, and all manner of cruelties. This came after a video of him beating his ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura went viral. A moment like this forces us to ask a lot of questions about culpability, rape culture, and how institutions of power are designed to protect their benefactors. It’s also a moment where a hell of a lot of people have decided to smarmily declare to the world, ‘Well, I never liked Diddy in the first place.’

So brave, right?

This is, alas, par for the course now whenever a celebrity does or says something awful. It’s one of those things that people just instinctively say when they see news of a horrific incident involving a well-known individual. We prime ourselves to be defensive, either of ourselves or the things we love, and there’s this sense of relief when you don’t have to do that. Oh phew, I wasn’t a fan of Kevin Spacey so I need to let everyone know, as though that’s a sign of my excellent taste and near-psychic abilities to avoid future complications. Quick, let me tweet it out a few times just to rub it in.

I’m so exhausted by the endless streams of tweets and the like from people who are making having never been a Diddy fan (or R. Kelly fan or Harvey Weinstein fan or whoever) a symbol of their moral purity. That’s what such declarations really mean. They’re a way for people to brag that their choices are always excellent. A lot of perennially online fandom rhetoric positions the things you like as examples of your ethical worth. You’re a good person, so all the music, actors, books, etc, you like must also be ‘good’, however that’s defined. It’s what leads some avid stans to spend huge chunks of their lives obsessively defending their favourites when they mess up, do something painfully human, or far worse. They’ve invested too much time and sense of self into this product or content, and the true nuances of life cannot fit into this rigid structure.

It’s also a way to avoid any kind of self-reflection. Bigotry is a societal sickness. It’s the smog we are all forced to breathe in, and even the most enlightened of us cannot help but be smothered by its overwhelming force. Maybe you weren’t a fan of that one abuser but you’ve probably been a fan of one in the past, a musician with a history of predatory behaviour or perhaps an actor who fell down the QAnon rabbit hole and spends their days calling vaccines the tool of a brainwashing cult. There are dishearteningly few famous people who have been ‘good’ their entire careers, partly because that’s a terrible way to judge someone’s life but also because the boundaries for such moral policing change as freely as the weather.

We’re really not supposed to hero-worship mere mortals but the celebrity industrial complex demands it. Nobody is immune to its charms. We like to like people, places, things. We like to bask in the warmth of fandom enthusiasm, to get pleasure from the artistic output of those whose talents greatly exceed our own. This is part of what makes life sweet and surprising. But it’s also not a linear journey free of obstacles. We’re meant to learn from it and improve things for the next generation, whether it’s making bigoted jokes unacceptable or ridding an industry of its abusers. These are steps we’re all meant to take, even though it often sucks and it’s far easier for us to put on our headphones and pretend we’re completely immune to the problem. See, we never liked that person, so why should we have to contend with the difficult road ahead posed by their exposure?

These situations also become an exhausting competition of holier-than-thou public scorn as those ‘clean’ from the stain try to fling the dirt around. A hell of a lot of bandwagon-jumping ghouls are giddily using the Combs case to go after their least favourite celebrities and baselessly claim they participated in his crimes. There are ‘songs’ made by AI floating around as supposed evidence that Combs abused Justin Bieber. Between this and all of the memes (seriously, you use this as your avenue for jokes?!), it feels as though the issue for some is less one of justice and more a score-settling fandom battle. Certainly, it doesn’t show much empathy for the potentially hundreds of victims who are hoping to seek some kind of healing from this abhorrent experience. It’s an extended display of that supposed ethical superiority: I never liked Diddy so I can be the judge, jury, and executioner of those I deem to be morally unfit.

So, no, I do not care if you never liked that abusive celebrity. I don’t think it’s a sign of your greatness that you weren’t a fan of someone who was revealed to be so horrid. It’s sheer dumb luck, not an act of psychic greatness. Rearrange your mindset, if for no other reason than it’s highly likely that a celebrity you do like might have skeletons in their closet. Even then, it’s important to remember that you are more than the products you consume.