Lizzo sexual harassment lawsuit: What women really think of the allegations

Lizzo vehemently denies any wrongdoing regarding the lawsuit filed by three of her former dancers. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION

There’s an expression in journalism: “Twitter isn’t real life.”

It’s an important one, because it’s easy to forget that Twitter is a social network used by a fairly small proportion of the world, which deliberately gives you the impression that ‘everyone’ thinks something, when it’s actually just a hundred or so people who exist within a similar social sphere to you. You might think that ‘everyone’ is talking about a specific issue, but in reality, the kind of people who exist more offline than online will most likely not have heard of it, or if they have, couldn’t care less.

Never has this maxim felt truer than this month, when the news broke that popstar Lizzo was being sued by her former back-up dancers over her conduct. The allegations are varied, but they include having fat-shamed employees, having taken employees to a strip club where they were made to watch a performer do something sexual with a banana and encouraged to join in with various exploits. She is also accused of failing to prevent religious and sexual discrimination in the workplace.

Lizzo vehemently denies any wrongdoing. In a statement posted last week, she wrote: “These last few days have been gut-wrenchingly difficult and overwhelmingly disappointing. My work ethic, morals, and respectfulness have been questioned. My character has been criticised. Usually I chose not to respond to false allegations, but these are as unbelievable as they sound and too outrageous to not be addressed.”

So we don’t actually know exactly what happened, and it sounds like it might be a classic case of his side, her side, and the truth. But on Twitter, where shades of grey are basically a hate crime, there’s something weird going on. The website which sustains itself on rage fuel seems to be searching for a way to retain the Lizzo love.

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Of course, there are plenty of people talking about how Lizzo betrayed the sisterhood and how abuse is abuse no matter where it comes from. But there are also people, who usually bay for blood at the merest hint of a scandal, who seem to be, for perhaps the first time in their lives, asking for clemency and caution. Friends who I’ve personally seen calling for Boris Johnson to be sent to prison, or who call Keir Starmer a traitor, just can’t quite work themselves up about Lizzo.

When I took a straw poll about how angry people were about Lizzo’s alleged actions, the consensus seemed to be, “I know I should be, but I’m just not.”

“Look, I realise the strip club stuff is seedy, and I’m not saying I condone it,” Sarah*, 30, told me. “But realistically, we’ve all had bosses who’ve got over-excited, ordered too many drinks and taken us to a bar HR wouldn’t have approved of, or let a party get out of hand. If you have a fun workplace, it’s an occupational hazard.”

Sophie*, 27, works in the music industry. “Being on tour with someone and dancing with them is a really intimate relationship,” she told me. “If anyone felt uncomfortable that’s bad, but in my experience, you become so close that normal working rules just don’t apply. You all sleep in the same hotel rooms, see each other naked, talk about your personal lives. Normal HR stuff just doesn’t apply.”

Ada*, 34, who also works in the creative arts, echoes this sentiment. “I’ve done coke with bosses, I’ve had bosses cry on my shoulder about break-ups, I held one boss’s hair back when she was throwing up at our Christmas party. I feel like workplaces are different from how they used to be, and the boundaries have changed. If you have a close relationship, which is normal in creative roles, then you see lots of sides to someone.”

Asking around my ‘Normal Friends’, the ones who don’t have TikTok, don’t get their news from Twitter and have never used the word “problematic”, the response was a collective shrug, with none of the handwringing seen among the Twitterati. Half of them didn’t know Lizzo had been accused of anything. “Did she actually do that?” asked one friend. “I mean, if she did, that’s not great, but, I’m not going to turn her music off. I don’t Google someone’s moral and legal history before I turn their music up.”

“I literally don’t care,” another friend told me. “I can’t understand how you could waste your time worrying about something that someone you don’t know might or might not have done.”

I find it hard to imagine being that unburdened by the collective opinions of the echo chamber. Living life online has given many of us (myself included) a sort of naval-gazing obsession that what we do really matters. The world is waiting for your statement on whatever the topical issue of the day is, as if there’s a collective public hunger for your views. It’s not true, of course, but it’s an easy way to end up thinking.

In a world where we’ve become obsessed with thinking about the footprint of everything we buy, wear, attend, listen to and watch, it’s refreshing to see people tentatively admitting that if they’re really, really honest, they actually sort of just… don’t care?

There’s a liberation in acknowledging that, in the grand scheme of things, whether you stop listening to Truth Hurts when it comes on Spotify, doesn’t actually change anything.

* Some names have been changed.