Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Lisa Marie Presley sues paper that called her fat

Ok, it's celebrity crap, but apparently calling someone fat can be grounds for a lawsuit.

According to Time, Lisa Marie Presley is suing Britain's Daily Mail for running photos of her eating at a restaurant along with pointed jabs at her weight, comparisons to her father's middle-age weight gain, and hints that she would, like her father, die a early death because of the fat(never mind that her father's death came from tasting the pharmaceutical rainbow.)

Now she's suing the paper, insisting that she's pregnant, not fat, and demanding an apology and damages for the "mental anguish".

Seriously? You can do that? What's the statute of limitations, because we could all retire on the financial support of every high school bully who ever engaged in casual cruelty.

I'm really of two minds on this one as far as reactions go. On one hand it's someone standing up to the media to demand treatment as a human being rather than a sacrifice on the altar of public amusement. On the other hand, by treating fat as a damaging insult, it's further marginalizing fat people and setting up fat as something to be hated and feared. I suppose you could go either way, depending on whether your glass is half full or half empty today. Personally I think the glass is simply twice as large as it needs to be to fulfill it's intended purpose.

I wonder if the glass can sue me for saying so? :-)

2 comments:

Margaret said...

Hi Jo, I don't know if you're aware, but British (and most European) courts pay out big money for libel cases, so perhaps that's her motivation.

vesta44 said...

Personally, I think she'd have been much better off calling a press conference and saying "No, I'm not fat, I'm pregnant, not that it's anyone's business if I'm either of them. None of you own my body, none of you have a right to say that my body meets your approval, so piss off." Or words to that effect. By suing, she perpetuates the fallacy that it's not ok to be fat (and how much of her father's use of the pharmaceutical rainbow was due to being hounded every second of every day by the press and fans? The man had no privacy, ever, after he got famous).