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Dancers suing Lizzo comment more on their litigation
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 8 August 2023
The dancers who are suing Lizzo and her touring company over allegations of sexual harassment and toxic working conditions have given another interview about their case.
They accuse the musician of trying to “gaslight” them in the statement she issued last week, and say that they have been approached by a number of dancers who have recounted their own bad experiences working with both Lizzo and other big name artists.
Arianna Davis, Crystal Williams and Noelle Rodriguez filed a lawsuit with the courts in California last week accusing Lizzo and her dance team captain Shirlene Quigley of inappropriate and unfair conduct. That included making false allegations of unprofessional behaviour against the dancers and then forcing them to go through a “brutal” twelve hour re-auditioning process.
In a post on social media, Lizzo hit back at the allegations, which she said were “sensationalised stories … coming from former employees who have already publicly admitted that they were told their behaviour on tour was inappropriate and unprofessional”.
In a new interview with Sky News, Williams and Rodriguez commented on Lizzo’s response. Williams said: “Her statement is just confirming the pattern of every time somebody speaks up or advocates for themselves, like we’re doing now, we get victim-blamed, we get gaslighted. And she likes to point the finger instead of addressing the issues that are being brought up”.
She added that dancers are badly treated on an “everyday basis” when they work with big name artists, confirming that – since she and her former colleagues went legal – they have been approached by other dancers who have worked with Lizzo, as well as those that are “just in the entertainment industry in general”.
Those people now feel “brave enough to share their experiences”, she went on. “Before people were just silent about it, they didn’t feel comfortable enough. They didn’t feel protected enough to call these artists out, to call these management teams out, and let them know, hey, what you’re doing is wrong”.
Noting that some of the claims in their lawsuit seem outrageous or outlandish, Rodriguez said: “Unfortunately, this treatment by management, artists, you know, it’s normal in the entertainment industry, but it sounds so outrageous because I feel this is the first time something like this has been brought to light so publicly. So, yes, it’s outrageous. Yes, all of these claims seem outlandish. But these are our experiences and this really happened to us”.
“So to just kind of deny and victim blame and not even take accountability”, she went on, referring back to Lizzo’s statement, “it’s just so insensitive and kind of invalidates our experience as a whole. We have proof of these things happening to us time and time again. So everything has been documented over time”.
