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Chappell Roan has yet again run afoul of the fame police. Over the weekend, soccer player Jorginho Frello, who plays on a professional Rio de Janeiro team, posted on Instagram Stories that his stepdaughter and wife were scolded by a security guard at a São Paulo hotel for getting too close to the pop idol. The interaction upset the child, and because she has two famous dads—her biological father is Jude Law—the angry post went viral. Roan is getting the blame.
Frello and Roan don’t dispute the facts of the encounter in question, which reportedly went something like this: The girl recognized Roan, a fellow guest, at the hotel breakfast and walked by to get a better look at a favorite singer. (Frello’s wife and child were in town to attend Lollapalooza Brasil, at which Roan was one of the headliners.) Frello was not with his family in São Paulo, but he wrote on Instagram in Portuguese that a “large security guard” visited the girl’s table “and began speaking in an extremely aggressive manner to both my wife and my daughter, saying that she shouldn’t allow my daughter to ‘disrespect’ or ‘harass’ other people.”
“My daughter was extremely shaken and cried a lot,” he wrote. Addressing Roan, he concluded, “WITHOUT YOUR FANS, YOU WOULD BE NOTHING. AND TO THE FANS, SHE DOES NOT DESERVE YOUR AFFECTION.”
Roan is already known for her complicated relationship to fame and fans. Her assertion of personal limits, like declining photos and autographs when she’s not at a performance or fan event, has angered some devotees, who believe that a solicitous posture toward fans and paparazzi is a fair price for celebrity. With this in mind, after Frello’s post, critics on social media castigated Roan for her supposedly callous posture toward fans. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Cavaliere, chimed in on X to write that he would ban Roan from performing at the city’s Todo Mundo no Rio music festival, which Shakira is headlining this year. (Cavaliere’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
In a video response, Roan denied that it was her personal security guard who admonished the girl and her mother. “I didn’t even see a woman and a child. No one came up to me, no one bothered me,” she said. The fans “did not come up to me. They weren’t doing anything. It’s unfair for security to just assume someone doesn’t have good intentions.”
To her detractors, she clarified, “I do not hate people who are fans of my music. I do not hate children.”
What an absurd thing for a pop star to have to say. Roan is drawing endless memes and jokes about her alleged kid-phobia, all because someone else who may or may not have been in her employ told a child to stay away from a celebrity eating her breakfast. There is only one person who definitely did something wrong in this situation, and it wasn’t Roan. Neither was it the girl who wanted to take a quick look at a beloved singer without making a peep. It was Frello, who turned what might have been a discouraging moment on an otherwise fun trip into an international witch hunt that taught his stepdaughter all the wrong lessons.
I’m no Chappell Roan superfan, and I think some of the ways she’s reacted to her fame have been a bit much. (She has said it is “harassment” for fans to greet her on the street and claimed that she kind of hopes to never have a hit song again, all while mounting massive tours and promotional campaigns for her releases.) But Roan has brought a refreshing transparency to discussions of stardom by sharing the details of some troubling fan interactions, rightfully insisting that they are not entitled to her time or attention. With the unusually hard lines she’s drawn—“I don’t give a fuck if you think it’s selfish of me to say no for a photo or for your time or for a hug”—she is the rare celebrity to risk alienating her own fan base by drawing explicit boundaries and holding superfan behavior up for deserved mockery.
This context surely informed Frello’s reaction to his stepdaughter’s encounter. If Roan weren’t known for her ambivalent relationship to her admirers, he might not have assumed that she was the one who directed a security guard to shoo his child away. It was an irresponsible assumption; as a celebrity in his own right with more than 5 million Instagram followers, he should hold himself to a higher standard of accuracy before smearing someone else as a jerk in his posts. And in the hands of another parent, famous or not, Roan’s reputation might have provided a jumping-off point for a discussion with his kid about the perils of fame.
We don’t know what conversations Frello and his wife had with their daughter behind the scenes, but their public freakout didn’t set a productive example. There are so many ways a parent could turn this situation into an opportunity for growth: If your kid is sad because it seems like a celebrity rebuffed her, you could have a discussion about how when we’re respectful and people still reject us, it might be upsetting, but we shouldn’t take it personally. You could explain that it’s probably really annoying to have hundreds of weirdos a day interrupting your every idle daydream, and that even celebrities deserve to eat their omelets in peace. You could teach her that that everyone has bad days, which can sometimes make people ruder or unfriendlier than we’d like.
I hope that Frello and his wife told their daughter, with the wisdom of experience, about the double-edged sword of fame—about how along with riches, adulation, and a multimillion-dollar vanity podcast comes the end of one’s ability to have a normal public life. Plan on making a platinum pop album? Hope you like cameras flashing in your face every time you step out to catch the newest Minions flick. Want to be a YouTuber, like one-third of Gen Alpha kids do? Kiss your quiet afternoons at SkyZone goodbye.
Heather Schwedel
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Too often, kids—and adults!—focus on the positive aspects of fame without considering the negatives. Bursting a child’s bubble could make her more satisfied with her own life: Even if she never gets to give the Oscars acceptance speech she practiced in front of the bathroom mirror last week, she can take solace in the knowledge that, unlike big-time celebrities, she can still be incognito at Legoland. That message might have resonated less with this particular child, whose dads are millionaire celebrities, than with a normie kid. But it would be worth the effort to try to instill a little humility in an impressionable mind.
Instead of taking this route, Frello and his wife may have taught their kid a different lesson: that when we get our feelings hurt, we should use our massive social media platforms to publicly shame anyone who may have had any tangential relationship to the person who hurt us.
Cavaliere, the Rio mayor who banned Roan from future music festivals in his city, had his own role in this lesson plan. In his post on X about Roan, he said that Frello’s stepdaughter would be a guest of honor at this year’s Todo Mundo no Rio festival, essentially rewarding her for her stepdad’s over-the-top rage. It was a ludicrous gesture: In no world is being scolded by a security guard—something all of us have had to endure at one point or another—an offense that warrants being treated like a survivor of a national tragedy. Chappell Roan should not be expected to protect every child from having their dreams dashed or their feelings hurt. That may be a hard truth, but it’s never too early for a kid to hear it.
