Chappell Roan performs during Hinterland Music Festival on Sunday, Aug. 4, 2024 in St. Charles, Iowa Photo: Lily Smith/The Register / USA TODAY NETWORK
Chappell Roan, the out pop star who ascended to the highest heights of stardom this summer, isn’t willing to accept the invasions of privacy that frequently come hand-in-hand with fame.
After releasing a 2017 E.P. and her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, in September 2023, Roan shot to fame this year after opening for Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour and releasing a new single, “Good Luck, Babe!” in April.
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But the 26-year-old, whose real name is Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, has been open about the struggles she’s had with her newfound fame and the attention she gets from fans. She has described her “Chappell Roan” alter ego as a “drag project,” and explained that thinking of her career in those terms has helped her separate her personal life from her job. As early as May 2023, she described having panic attacks between fan meet-and-greets while on tour.
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“People would tell me really heavy things,” she told Glamour. “It’s such an interesting world we live in where everyone wants to see who you really are on social media. What people want is to see your personality and to connect with you. But there’s this delusion that they know you and that they can tell you anything. And it’s like, no, I don’t want to hear the trauma because I have to then go process that, and then go perform a show like I didn’t hear all of that.”
More recently, she’s come out with a much more forceful defense of her own privacy. In an August 19 TikTok video, she compared fans approaching her while she’s off duty to someone approaching a random woman on the street and demanding her time and attention.
“If you saw a random woman on the street, would you yell at her from the car window? Would you harass her in public?” Roan asked. “Would you be offended if she says no to your time because she has her own time?”
In another clip, she rejected the idea that she should accept that fans feel entitled to her time simply because it’s considered “normal” and the price of success. “I don’t give a f**k if you think it’s selfish of me to say no for a photo or for your time or to — for a hug,” she said. “That’s not normal, that’s weird. It’s weird how people think that you know a person just cause you see them online and you listen to the art they make.”
“I’m allowed to say no to creepy behavior,” she added.
Days later, Roan posted a seven-slide Instagram post that further explained her position.
“I’ve been in too many non-consensual physical and social interactions and I just need to lay it out and remind you, women don’t owe you s**t,” she wrote, noting in the post’s caption that she’d turned off comments because “this isn’t a group conversation” and that she’s “not afraid of the consequences for demanding respect.”
“I chose this career path because I love music and art and honoring my inner child,” she wrote. “I do not accept harassment of any kind because I chose this path, nor do I deserve it.”
“When I’m on stage, when I’m performing, when I’m in drag, when I’m at a work event, when I’m doing press…I am at work. Any other circumstance, l am not in work mode. I am clocked out,” she continued. “I don’t agree with the notion that I owe a mutual exchange of energy, time, or attention to people I do not know, do not trust, or who creep me out — just because they’re expressing admiration. Women do not owe you a reason why they don’t want to be touched or talked to.”
“This has nothing to do with the gratitude and love I feel for my community, for the people who respect my boundaries, and for the love I feel from every person who lifts me up and has stuck with me to help the project get to where it is now,” Roan, who has rapidly become something of an LGBTQ+ icon, added. “I am specifically talking about predatory behavior (disguised as ‘superfan’ behavior) that has become normalized because of the way women who are well-known have been treated in the past.”
Roan wrote that she embraces success and is grateful for the turn her career has taken this year. But she went on to plead with fans to stop touching her, to stop harassing her family, and to stop calling her Kayleigh.
“There is a part of myself that I save just for my project and all of you,” she concluded. “There is a part of myself that is just for me, and I don’t want that taken away from me.”
Roan’s statement has been polarizing. As Slate’s Cat Cardenas noted, many fans on social have expressed sympathy, while others have said that “she’s not really cut out to be a pop girlie.”
on a human level – if I became as famous as Chappell Roan as quickly as she did I would become the joker within, like 2 days pic.twitter.com/hkKSaO8HNY
Response from the media has also run the gamut, with Cardenas criticizing the extremes of “stan” culture built around unprecedented access to celebrities via social media. Out called Roan’s statement “an overdue cultural reset for pop music stans,” and Vogue sided with the pop star in comparing contemporary super fans with smartphone cameras to the predatory paparazzi of the ’90s and early 2000s.
At the other end of the spectrum, an August 29 Daily Mailheadline screamed, “Chappell Roan’s foul-mouthed outbursts at fans who give her the fast fame she craves prove she’s ALREADY a spoiled diva with an ugly attitude” — proving Roan and her supporters’ point.
