I was asked to speak at the Young Women In Law gala in Toronto recently – THANK YOU for your generous donation toCovenant House Vancouver! – and during the Q&A someone asked me why I hadn’t been mentioning stories about celebrities and drugs. And my response to that was… well… reporting on celebrities doing drugs is kinda like reporting on celebrities going shopping. It’s pretty pedestrian. To take it from pedestrian to somewhat interesting, you have to look for the value-added. Like whether or not a new celebrity mother is doing a bump when she’s still breastfeeding. Or when a young celebrity who claims clean living is constantly tweaking in his basement and can’t be bothered to go on tour.
So Rihanna was at Coachella. And there’s a video that’s been posted of her and people think she’s snorting coke.
Rihanna has since posted an alternate video that’s less cokey and more weedy:
Whatever she was doing, for some reason this has become a baby scandal because… I don’t know. I mean if it was Kate Middleton snorting coke, yeah, I get it. But since when did we start seeing Kate Middleton the same way we see Rihanna?
Kate Middleton couldn’t be caught smoking cigarettes when she used to smoke cigarettes. Rihanna doesn’t give a sh-t what you catch her doing. So this was supposedly her response to the coke accusation:
"N---- your lame ass got some f-cking nerve!!! Any fool could see that's a joint that I'm basing with cigarette! Who snorts tobacco??!! FOH witcho 'never been to a rodeo so someone squeezing their nose means they're doing coke' lookin ass!!"
Which, because she’s Rihanna, is actually kind of hilarious - denying a drug claim by shaming those who can’t tell the difference between their drugs. She is her own best publicist, one of the few celebrities who has taken over publicity duties on social media to great effect. Will it hurt her? F-ck no. Right now, the worst thing to get busted over is “inauthenticity”. Everything comes back to being believable. Brian Williams? No helicopter. Beyonce? The elevator wasn’t flawless. Ariana Grande? Please.
Rihanna? What did you believe about Rihanna before this video that you don’t believe now that you’ve seen this video?
