The Smear Campaign Against Jennifer Lopez Should Be Investigated and Exposed
Jennifer Lopez at the “Road to the Golden Globes” party during the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 2024 in Toronto, Canada. Source: Getty Images
Across more than three decades, Jennifer Lopez’s talent, beauty, savviness, and perseverance have established her as an entertainment industry legend. She has used those qualities to take big risks, break barriers as a Latina, and rise from homelessness to become a centi-millionaire with an estimated $400 million net worth. Her accomplishments and luxurious lifestyle are enough to make people jealous. So jealous in fact, that many haters have converted their jealousy into vicious vitriol where they revel in her personal and professional hardships.
For several years now, Lopez has received high online hate. This past year, however, the hate has reached a point where even her slightest move is subject to morbid scrutiny and ridicule. She has been crucified for everything, from reminiscing over her childhood bodega order to walking up the stairs at the 2024 Met Gala, where she served as a co-chair. A few days after her Met Gala appearance, divorce rumors started to swirl surrounding her marriage to Ben Affleck. For three months, from mid-May to mid-August, a series of rumors and conspiracy theories arose on why their marriage was coming to an end so soon. Lopez canceled her tour amidst the overflow of unfavorable press, and she filed for divorce from Ben Affleck on August 20th after 25 months of marriage. All of this happened shortly after the release of Lopez’s trilogy of works: the album This Is Me… Now, the film This Is Me Now… A Love Story and the documentary Greatest Love Story Never Told.
Articles such as those from the Los Angeles Times, Elle, and Popsugar have denounced the hate against Lopez by pinpointing the misogyny, lack of empathy, ageism, selective outrage, and the schadenfreude where people have taken pleasure in her failures. Those are all influencing the coverage about her. However, the main reason why she has received so much hate comes down to one thing that has barely been discussed—media manipulation. Media manipulation does not just refer to selectively edited pictures. It also refers to coordinated plots to push certain narratives and manipulate people into holding certain opinions. Instead of merely denouncing the hate against Lopez, I suggest that she is the target of a coordinated smear campaign that traces back to one or more Hollywood elites, and that her “downfall” is not organic. Even her producing partner and agent Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas hints at that possibility in her Deadline interview: “Isn’t it a shame we are at a point where we allow a small group to create a false narrative through gossip and internet bullying towards a woman in the face of her tremendous success and consistent humanity? It’s completely unfair and irresponsible.”
What are smear campaigns?
Smear campaigns are utilized as weapons to destroy someone’s reputation and career. They are often spearheaded by a small group of bad actors (often connected to powerful people and organizations) who exploit people’s gullibility by pushing half-truths, falsehoods, and exaggerated narratives about somebody they consider to be a threat. There are a range of smear tactics orchestrators use when targeting someone. They make sure to farm outrage through unfounded rumors, selective quoting, vile insults, the hyperbolization of past mistakes, purposefully taking events out of context, promoting negative headlines and buzzwords, and fabricating narratives. They often incorporate a few facts about a target so that people do not think a smear campaign is occuring. Targets of smear campaigns get demonized for their every move, and anyone who defends the target can get attacked until they cave into the pressure. The suddenness and repetition of negativity create a system of social tyranny where positive opinions about a target are suppressed and everyone must go along with the herd mentality. The increased occurrences of coordinated social media activity only make things worse. Small groups of accounts, such as bots, paid trolls, paid influencers, and journalists have significantly influenced the information millions of people receive online by rigging social media algorithms to push their agendas to the forefront.
It is worth noting that her film This Is Me Now… A Love Story has a “Certified Fresh” seal on Rotten Tomatoes with a 75% critics approval rating. The album This Is Me… Now has a green (i.e., acclaimed) rating on Metacritic. However, for some reason, articles in different outlets have said that the movie and documentary were “critically panned” and “got negative reviews.” If you look on IMDb, the film has been critically panned there: it has a 4.1/10 rating across over 6,900 reviews. However, the “critically panned” narrative is not entirely accurate, and it feels like the Rotten Tomatoes score is deliberately ignored. Particularly because the notion that the movie failed is more sensational and emotionally charged than the notion of it being successful.
Another thing to wonder is this: did that 4.1/10 rating on IMDb really arise organically (i.e., because people really believed that it was “not a good movie"), or did it arise as the result of a review bombing campaign seeking to delegitimize Lopez as an actress? Review bombing is the onslaught of negative reviews left on a piece of media to sabotage its performance, and those reviews are not meant to serve as fair, constructive evaluations of a movie’s quality. Even if the review bombing campaign was not directly coordinated, it could still happen under the influence of coordinated hate on social media.
Examples of anti-Lopez smears
Lopez’s diehard fans have spotted suspicious online accounts and signs of a “paid hate campaign” that has extended beyond social media. Indeed, writers at mainstream media outlets have aided in stoking hatred and abuse against her. For example, on March 14th and 15th, a writer named Jem Aswad published two hit pieces against Lopez for the news outlet Variety. The March 14th article carried the headline, “Jennifer Lopez Cancels Multiple Dates on ‘This Is Me… Now’ Tour Amid Weak Ticket Sales.” Then the March 15th article mentioned her alongside Justin Timberlake as two pop stars whose careers have not “aged gracefully.” Variety continues publishing a series of articles attacking Lopez. Then on June 1st, Aswad published an article titled, “Jennifer Lopez’s Canceled Tour, and Society’s Twisted Pleasure in Seeing Strong Women Fail.” It is very suspicious that a writer who reviled Lopez back-to-back suddenly exercised performative empathy in this way. He pretended to feel bad for her and not to have been part of the problem, but Aswad knew what he was doing by publishing that article. He was avoiding accountability for how his spearheading of the “poor sales” narrative contributed to widespread harassment against Lopez. Orchestrators and enablers of smear campaigns evade accountability either by showing performative empathy or blaming the target for something else.
Even worse, he admits in that article that Variety publishes negative headlines because “it’s a sad fact of our business that bad news gets a lot more clicks than good news.” Research across multiple years has shown that, indeed, negative and fake headlines take off way faster than positive and true headlines. Nevertheless, it speaks to Aswad’s lack of journalistic integrity, as he never spoke about how much the seven shows had actually sold numbers-wise. It is possible that he planted those negative stories about her as Variety watched on. It is possible that several members of Variety’s staff are the primary orchestrators of Lopez’s smear campaign, despite having her as their cover star a month before those two articles. But Variety is not the only possible suspect—The Daily Mail is an outlet that has repeatedly published negative, sensationalist, and downright misogynistic articles about Lopez. They published a retraction on August 31st, admitting that they published libel about her documentary, the state of her marriage, and her alcohol line, Delola, in an article from August 2nd. This warrants further questioning on how many other libelous articles The Daily Mail may have published on her.
The anti-Lopez smear campaign has been relentless in all regards—people have severely hyperbolized her alleged offenses, dogpiled on her without context, and have fallen for narratives that are either unverified or debunkable. Mainstream outlets have published negative headlines and taken jabs at her in different articles, because it increases their online engagement and, ultimately, the money they make. The news of her canceling the tour due to “poor sales” is far more intriguing than her canceling to be with her twin children and other loved ones. So, that narrative got widely regurgitated in mass media, all while showing absolutely zero concern for her mental health. Netizens asserted that she did not really cancel the tour for personal reasons—rather that she canceled it due to poor sales and used her family as an excuse. There were even conspiracy theories that she “staged” her marital struggles in preparation for the tour cancellation. Regardless of the actual tour sales, those narratives were beyond disrespectful and dehumanizing. It is scary how people celebrated the thought of Lopez having poor mental health, even with the supposed awareness of how cyberbullying has led to celebrities being depressed, suicidal, or even dead by suicide. It is even scarier to think about how a small group of bots, paid trolls, paid influencers, and journalists could be responsible for influencing hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of netizens to crucify Lopez via TikToks, YouTube essays, and Reddit comments.
If you have consumed and bought into the negative narratives about Lopez, you might think it is “karma” for all her alleged misdeeds, lack of talent, and extreme amounts of egoism. But if you believe that you formed those opinions entirely based on facts and without the influence of coordinated (i.e., inorganic) activity, then you are severely underestimating your gullibility level and are complicit in the harassment against her. Smear campaign orchestrators commit so much character assassination against a target that the general public believes that the target is unworthy of forgiveness, deserving of all the abuse they get, and that any negative story about them must be true. What encompasses a smear campaign is not just what is being said, but how it is being said. It is okay to constructively critique something or dislike someone for petty reasons. However, when petty dislike becomes disproportionate hatred that results in vile criticisms or even false information towards someone, that is an issue.
Actress and singer Eiza González correctly stated while defending Lopez back in May, “How can you complain about someone being mean while enjoying [being] mean about them?” It is hypocritical to preach about the importance of mental health, kindness, and seeking help while dogpiling on a celebrity for no reason. What if her smear campaign was spearheaded by people affiliated with Affleck or, given the history of their one-sided “feud,” Mariah Carey? What if the stories you heard about Lopez’s alleged misbehavior were coordinated by influencers in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars in payment? What if you were manipulated into mocking her movie and documentary at the hands of a few social media accounts originating from bot networks and troll farms? While there is no research report confirming coordinated activity against her, those are all possibilities based on dynamics that have occurred in other smear campaigns.
Why does this matter?
You might think there are bigger issues to worry about than a celebrity facing vitriol, because “that is the price of fame.” Lopez herself recently said to comedian Nikki Glaser in their Interview Magazine conversation that she has learned to deal with harsh criticism throughout her career and knows that the online narratives about her do not reflect her real personality. But as she also says, she is not “Teflon” when she sees something hurtful. It can stick with her, and why should she have to endure that? As the budding pop icon Chappell Roan famously said in August, abuse and harassment should not be treated as an “acceptable” or “normal” part of fame. Having unfavorable press bombard your name for months is enough to take a toll on even the most mentally resilient, emotionally intelligent person. And given that reputation reigns supreme in Hollywood, social media conjecture does reflect on celebrities and can negatively impact their career trajectories. Anne Hathaway’s negative online reputation in 2013 led directors and producers to decline to work with her, despite being a newly-mined Oscar winner. The same could happen to Lopez—without dismantling her smear campaign, people may refuse to work with her or invest in her on anything. Without people desiring to work with her, it will be virtually impossible for her to expand her body of work and leave an empowering legacy.
In addition, hate against a celebrity is not just about that celebrity—it is also about humanity and how people interact with information. When mainstream media outlets promote abusive content toward celebrities, they reinforce social tyranny by encouraging people to commit character assassination against those who do not warrant such scrutiny. The same thing applies to social media. Media entities enabling the spread of hatred, bigotry, and disinformation are also complicit in undermining diversity and sowing discord in how people interact with each other online. The eagerness to bring celebs down can leave ordinary people fearing ostracism for their past errors and non-problematic behaviors, negatively impacting the mental health of both the cyberbullies and the cyberbullied.
It does not help that misogyny, including racialized misogyny, remains pervasive in the pop culture sphere. Although there is awareness of how media abuse and tabloid journalism negatively impacted women celebrities in the 2000s, the two negative phenomena are still alive two decades later. The only difference is that now it is not just media conglomerates who can grift off of it—commoners can too. Even with fewer people buying and reading print magazines, social media has become its tabloid thanks to gossip rags such as DeuxMoi and commoners “spilling the tea” through blinds. Blinds consist of netizens submitting anonymous rumors about celebrities’ behavior or personal lives, which can be based on real information or completely fictitious. The gossip surrounding them is generally not harmless, and even with disclaimers about the rumors being “alleged” or potentially false, people still take them seriously. In this “clout-chasing” age where social media platforms prioritize engagement first and foremost, people can lie about celebrity encounters for views and money. Women celebrities are most harmed by blind culture, with a double whammy for women celebrities of color. The circulation of racist stereotypes in Hollywood has influenced that dynamic, and pop culture enthusiasts can end up spewing racialized misogyny if they do not think about what they read or say.
Throughout Lopez’s career, the media has glorified her for her sexiness while demonizing her as a difficult and demanding romantic partner. Their treatment of her reinforces the “spicy Latina” stereotype that fetishizes Latinas in dehumanizing ways. Affleck himself stated on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast back in 2021 that back in the early 2000s: “People were so f***ing mean about her. Sexist, racist, you know, ugly, vicious s**t was written about her in ways that if you wrote them now, you will be fired for saying those things you said.” Unfortunately, though, people are still saying extremely vile things about her without facing any consequences. Vitriol against her has not only been condoned, but it has also been encouraged.
Racialized misogyny and ageism are all influencing the attacks against Lopez, a 55-year-old daughter of two Boricuas from Puerto Rico. Some non-Latinos have been racist towards her, yet some Latinos have questioned her Latinidad as a non-native Spanish speaker. She has faced misogyny and ageism for her romantic history, assertiveness, work ethic, and flamboyance with her fame. These hateful dynamics further normalize online violence against women and desensitize people from the negative impacts of anti-Latina misogyny. Mocking her for her Spanish errors promotes the exclusion of non-Spanish-speaking Latinos and the dismissal of the linguistic diversity that exists throughout Latin America and its diaspora. These dynamics have much greater implications that taint social justice efforts, pit Latinos and other groups against each other, and distract from fights against oppression.
Who exactly is smearing Lopez?
It would take a while to confirm the orchestrators and enablers of her smear campaign because the magnitude and extensiveness of the hate she has received throughout 2024 and earlier is extreme. Sophisticated smear techniques can make it very hard to spot media manipulation, especially when grains of truth are mixed in. There are also obstacles of disinformation researchers being attacked, the defunding of disinformation efforts, social media companies raising API prices to make data research less accessible, and social media companies failing to enforce their anti-harassment rules. Whoever the orchestrators are, their goals are to murder Lopez’s legacy, manipulate the public into loathing her, and isolate her from the rest of the world. The rhetoric goes beyond petty hate, and a disinformation researcher needs to investigate and expose the dynamics for what they are. The orchestrators and their enablers should be held accountable for the ways they derailed her This Is Me… Now era. They should not be allowed to continue operating in secrecy, nor ignored in hopes that they will eventually stop.
The smear campaign against Jennifer Lopez is a sinister attempt at destroying an ambitious, legendary entertainer. Even if you dislike her, allowing her smear campaign to go unchecked is dangerous. The ways in which celebrities are discussed affect how people communicate with each other and discuss different issues. If spewing anti-Lopez hate is okay, then it leaves room for people to justify hatred against anyone of their choice, even whole groups of people. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. If we expect to create a world where mental health matters and diversity is valued, we must denounce smear campaigns against everyone. That means taking accountability when you spread false information, harass someone for no reason, or fall prey to a smear campaign. It means holding media entities accountable for the ways they reinforce hate in society. Continuing to parrot hateful rhetoric about Lopez says more about you than it does about her. Whatever negative beliefs you have about her, remember that a small number of bots, paid trolls, paid influencers, and journalists may have manipulated you into holding them.