Say what you will about embattled attorney-turned-entertainment-“personality” Star Jones (and the commenters at New York Magazine are saying plenty), but never say she lets folks keep her name in their mouths without a strong rebuttal.
Back in February, Bill O’Reilly had cross words for Michelle Obama’s alleged negative comments about America, and decided that evoking lynching imagery, a practice that’s seen a certain resurgence in the past year, was a good idea:
I don’t want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that’s how she really feels — that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever — then that’s legit. We’ll track it down.”
… and Star took him to task for it:
What the hell? If it’s “legit,” you’re going to “track it down?” And then what do you plan to do?
How dare this white man with a microphone and the trust of the public think that in 2008, he can still put the words “lynch and party” together in the same sentence with reference to a black woman; in this case, Michelle Obama? I don’t care how you “spin it” in the “no spin zone,” that statement in and of itself is racist, unacceptable and inappropriate on every level.
This was when I really started sitting up and paying attention to Ms. Jones. I hate The View; I really do. I’ve always hated The View. I don’t like sitting in a room with five cackling women who can’t stop talking over each other in my personal life, so I’m not going to tune on a late weekday morning and watch random, unjustifiably rich women do it on TV.
Even so, ever so often, I’d catch a clip of Star Jones very decisively arguing in favor of some minority cause or placing a conversation that was rapidly growing rabid (asView discussion are wont to do) into a very grounded, culturally aware context. I’d file it away, in case anyone ever asked my opinion of Star Jones (and, strangely, that day would come sooner than I thought) and keep flipping channels.
Then, she got married. And undid a lot of the goodwill she’d built up, championing The Issues among stodgy, out-of-touch post-prime (and doe-eyed conservative) women by becoming the lone food source for the bulimic media feeding frenzy that was her multimillion-dollar wedding. That’s when my peers started asking the obvious Star Jones question, “Can you believe this chick?”
I never said much by way of response. As when Juanita Bynum’s similarly excessive wedding was televised in its entirety on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, I kind of cringed, cast aspersion on how long it would last, and kept my mouth shut. Sure, selling the soul of your nuptials to publicity-starved businesses and your photos to the highest bidder is tacky. But it’s also pretty darned savvy. A (practically) free, super-large wedding in exchange for a little on-air name-dropping and product placement? Respect that hustle.
Yes, it was sickening to watch her grub for free swag. Yes, it was more than a little maddening to hear her repeatedly deny that she’d had gastric-bypass surgery, when it was pretty obvious that she didn’t drop that weight without a scalpel’s involvement. Yes, the Star-and-Al Show of grinning at pretty much every celebrity bash, opening, or premiere they could muster had the tendency to grate on a nerve.
But let’s be fair. How public she wanted her wedding (and subsequently ill-fated marriage) was her own decision. The details of her weight loss were hers to protect. And it’s not like she didn’t take her lumps for it all. The View fired her. That other show she launched was canceled. She’s constantly vilified by “the public” on message boards and comments sections. And now she’s going through a divorce.
So Wednesday, when Barbara Walters went on Oprah, hawking her memoir and saying very pointedly that Star used to be “so obese she could barely walk out onto The View set,” I felt like some pretty serious brake-pumping was in order. Isn’t it enough that Walters was instrumental in defacing Jones’ public image? Now she wants to gossip with Oprah, of all people, about her weight? (And worse is Oprah having the nerve to chime in, all, “Oh, we alllll know she didn’t lose that weight with dieting and pilates….” Yeah, you would know, Oprah, considering how doggedly you’re insisting your recent weight gain is “thyroid-related.”)
Anyway…
Naturally, Star had a rebuttal for Walters today:
It is a sad day when an icon like Barbara Walters, in the sunset of her life, is reduced to publicly branding herself as an adulterer, humiliating an innocent family with accounts of her illicit affair and speaking negatively against me all for the sake of selling a book. It speaks to her true character.
Ooop.
I mean, sure you could go into a whole pot-kettle discussion about how what these women reveal to the media “speaks to their true character,” but I like to think that Star has evolved by leaps and bounds since all her hard knocks in recent years. And the things she chooses to discuss with the press these days tend to be much less frivolous than “who she’s wearing.”
That said, she’s one woman who certainly knows how to defend herself and, on occasion, others. For that reason alone, you can’t really help but give her her props.
