Chappell Roan, a pop star from Willard, Mo., has dedicated her career to creating a queer space built on love and safety. She grew up in an environment where she felt loved but didn’t get to experiment with being herself until she moved out. Her platform now allows other people to see themselves in a form of media that often doesn’t often represent them.

She has now become the name on anyone who’s interested in pop culture’s lips, and found herself in the center of another controversy, this time in Brazil. This current controversy involves a security officer and a fan. In her short two years in the spotlight, Roan is still going strong despite people claiming her 15 minutes of fame are over. This Brazil incident is just another controversy marking Roan’s time in the public eye. 

After her breakout 2024 Coachella performance, quickly followed by the release of her hit single “Good Luck, Babe”, Roan grew from one million monthly Spotify listeners to 40 million in just six months. Her latest single “The Subway” was a big hit and was nominated for the Best Pop Solo Performance and Record of the Year Grammys amid the controversy. 

Despite her success, she failed to avoid headlines whether it be people celebrating her meteoric rise to stardom or trying to tear her down. 

I want to make my bias very clear. I have been a fan of Roan since the summer of 2023. I distinctly remember sitting in the backseat of my Grandma’s car with my headphones on and “My Kink Is Karma” randomly played. Her debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess”, really connected with me as a queer person who doesn’t live in a big city like New York or Los Angeles. Sure, I’m not far from Seattle but I haven’t really experienced it.

Women in the public eye have always existed as a lightning rod for people to take their issues out on. Since 2020, Roan has refused to perform normality and sit quietly for the comfort of others. There’s countless examples in the music industry alone of this, but Britney Spears is the one I want to zoom in on.

People hated Spears because she was a strong woman who chose to sexualize herself on her terms, not on the terms of others. In the tabloid frenzy of 2007-2008, she was the subject of hundreds of covers. The most infamous incident was when paparazzi harassed her to the point of her shaving her head on a whim. “Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back,” Spears said on the matter in her book.

In 2007, TMZ founder, Harvey Levin, said, “We work as hard at breaking a Britney Spears story as NBC would work on breaking a President Bush piece.” To me, this quote is diabolical.

Unfortunately, it is deeper than people just not liking Roan. I believe she has become a target of a hate campaign due to multiple factors but especially due to her being a queer leftist woman in the public eye. Some people haven’t moved on from the 2010s archetype ‘Blue-haired and pronoun having [Social Justice Warrior] gets destroyed.’ 

They see somebody like her having success and genuine impact on the industry — like shaming paparazzi or calling for better payment of artists during her 2025 Grammy acceptance speech — and feel the need to tear her down. 

To the dismay of the crowd who doesn’t want everything to be political, this is a political issue.

Roan highlighted the rich queer culture that exists in Middle America on her album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.” She spotlights drag culture and how integral it is to queer culture. The Midwest has a reputation when it comes to the anti-LGBTQ policies that are platformed in the region, policies specifically targeting a rich, queer community that exists there.  

In a time where conservatism is becoming the norm, to have an out and proud, outspoken, and confident queer woman in the forefront of culture is a big deal.

Criticism of Roan exists even within her own fanbase, coming from her decision to cancel shows or refusing to take pictures with her fans. 

She posted now infamous TikToks about how uncomfortable she was with people asking to take pictures. In the TikTok, she said, “I need you to answer questions – just answer my questions for a second: If you saw a random woman on the street, would you yell at her from your car window?” Some fans took it very personally and felt offended that someone they admired wouldn’t want to take a picture with them even though this person they love doesn’t know them.

Paparazzi are famously dangerous and invasive. They have been known to take it way too far just to get a candid photo. Think about the high-speed car chase by paparazzi that resulted in the death of Princess Diana. For some reason, when Roan complains about it, she’s suddenly in the wrong and everybody is pro-paparazzi. 

Roan made history at the 2024 VMAs, but not for any award she won. She completely re-trained the paparazzi after a verbal altercation with a photographer on the red carpet. While Roan spoke with one of her team members while adjusting her dress, a paparazzo suddenly yelled at them to “Shut the fuck up!” 

Roan responded to the paparazzo with, “You shut the fuck up!”  Roan received some flack for this, but other celebrities have commented on the tamed nature of red carpets since the incident.

Somehow, people got mad at her for this but she didn’t back down. She instead continued to speak her mind and set her boundaries. In October 2024, she posted another TikTok after facing a lot of pressure to speak up on the issue of the 2024 presidential election. She said she would be voting for Kamala Harris but didn’t feel comfortable putting her full chest behind an endorsement because she didn’t agree with a lot of Harris’s policies (especially as it pertains to the ongoing genocide is Palestine).

As with most things she says that piss people off, people come at this opinion of hers with a bad faith interpretation and absolutely zero nuance. Online discourse in general tends to lack nuance which is a whole separate issue.

Since those first controversies, she is constantly getting in trouble for fighting paparazzi which is completely within her rights. She always just yells back at them or most recently, films them back. Other stars — like Justin Bieber — get violent and throw water bottles at the paparazzi but get none of the blowback.

The latest and greatest scandal took place in Brazil during March 2026. Soccer player Jorginho Frello alleged that the morning of March 21, 2026 that his wife Catherine Harding and his stepdaughter were at breakfast in their hotel when they spotted Roan at a nearby table. 

The stepdaughter was an excited fan and wanted to confirm it was her. She walked past Roan’s table, saw it was her, and smiled before returning back to hers. 

A little later is when the controversial part took place: a security officer that the family assumed worked for Roan went up to them and allegedly spoke to them in an aggressive manner that led to Frello’s stepdaughter crying. Frello then posted a long statement shaming her for allowing this to happen and calling for her fans to not support her as “SHE DOES NOT DESERVE YOUR AFFECTION.”

This was quickly followed by Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Cavaliere banning her from performing at the city’s Todo Mundo no Rio festival “as long as he’s in power.” She hadn’t even made a statement of her own yet. When she finally did, she claimed she never saw the family and that she was unaware of the security guards’ actions as it wasn’t her personal security.

Weeks went by with silence from both parties while of course the flames continued to only burn Roan. As far as the internet was concerned, Roan might as well have personally walked up to that kid and punched them in the face.

Since then, the security guard has said he doesn’t work for Roan and acted out of his own accord and Frello said Roan and him worked things out in private and harbours no hard feelings.

If you haven’t caught onto how this works yet, people don’t care that it is a now resolved misunderstanding because Roan is the curly haired devil of the music industry. That’s because they’re not actually mad at what she does but at her existence. 

There are so many actually bad people in the industry who only receive a sliver of the hate Roan does. She has created such a safe space for queer people in less safe parts of the country and I believe she should be celebrated for that. Leave Chappell Roan alone.