Life is beautiful due its unpredictability. For example, until this weekend I never would have been able to imagine a scenario in which global pop superstar Chappell Roan and 2021 third-place Ballon d'Or finisher Jorginho were engaged in a feud because a security guard may or may not have yelled at Jude Law's daughter. And yet that is precisely the world in which we live.
Roan was in São Paulo to headline Lollapalooza Brasil this weekend. So was Jorginho's wife, Irish singer Catherine Harding, whose 11-year-old daughter was born during her previous marriage to Jude Law. In a lengthy and dramatic Instagram post, Jorginho claimed that a member of Roan's security team accosted his stepdaughter after she walked past Roan's breakfast table at a hotel where both Roan and his family were staying:
During breakfast, the artist walked past their table. My daughter, like any child, recognised her, got excited, and just wanted to make sure it was really her.
And the worst part is she didn't even approach her. She simply walked past the singer's table, looked to confirm it was her, smiled, and went back to sit with her mum. She didn't say anything, didn't ask for anything.
A large security guard came over to their table while they were still having breakfast and began speaking in an extremely aggressive manner to both my wife and my daughter, saying that she shouldn't allow my daughter to "disrespect" or "harass" other people. Honestly, I don't know at what point simply walking past a table and looking to see if someone is there can be considered harassment.
He even said he would file a complaint against them with the hotel, while my 11-year-old daughter was sitting there in tears. My daughter was extremely shaken and cried a lot.
Jorginho finished his post with an all-caps declaration: "WITHOUT YOUR FANS, YOU WOULD BE NOTHING. AND TO THE FANS, SHE DOES NOT DESERVE YOUR AFFECTION."
Roan responded to Jorginho by sharing her own version of events in a video posted to her Instagram account. "I didn't even see a woman and a child," said Roan. "No one came up to me, no one bothered me ... I did not ask the security guard to go up and talk to this mother and child."
Roan went on to say that it was unfair for the security guard to assume that Jorginho's daughter didn't have good intentions. "You did not deserve that," said Roan, after clarifying that she does not "hate children."
More interesting than the question of what a security guard may or may not have said to an 11-year-old is one about just how much calculation went into Jorginho's post. A story about Chappell Roan being rude to one of her fans is fine-tuned to create as much controversy as possible precisely because of who Roan is: an artist who has always been outspoken about her discomfort with fame and some of her unpleasant interactions with fans. Roan's position on fame and her prickly relationship with the public have become the defining features of her celebrity profile, and so any story about a poor interaction between her and a fan is a potent discourse-generating engine.
Harding also got in on the action on Sunday when she posted her own front-facing video about the incident. Harding's video is a perfect piece of celebrity narrative management, in that it is framed as a reluctant response to a situation she'd rather just move on from, but is also meticulously constructed for the sole purpose of putting her opponent's ass squarely in the jackpot. Harding said the security guard was "100 percent not a security guard of the hotel" and was was obviously with Roan. She then claimed that the security guard told her that her daughter was "badly educated." The video ends with Harding revealing that her daughter's birthday was ruined because they decided not to attend Roan's concert following the incident.
Again, life is beautiful because of its unpredictability. For example, Chappell Roan is currently getting dogwalked in PR battle by a soccer player who is best known for his funny little penalty kicks and a woman whose claim to fame is competing on the UK edition of The Voice in 2020.
