Reports claimed that Lopes started the fire because Rison didn’t buy her shoes, suggesting that she was both shallow and unhinged. In retaliation, Lopes reportedly filled a bathtub with Rison’s sneakers and set them ablaze. The fire spread, destroying the whole house the couple shared.
“Seems that Left-Eye, police say, turned into Evil-Eye,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch observed. There was little mention that the home was where Lopes also lived, and that she, too, had lost countless possessions. She was charged with felony arson and released on $75,000 bail.
Lopes struggled with alcohol, and the couple’s fights had turned violent before. Less than a year before the fire, Rison—whose nickname was Bad Moon—was arrested in a Kroger grocery store parking lot in an upscale Atlanta neighborhood for beating Lopes and firing a gun. The charges were dropped, so the press simply described their relationship as “combustive,” not abusive.
Reports in the story’s aftermath rightly implicate Lopes in starting the fire, but the extent to which they cast Rison as the victim, downplaying his part in the violent relationship, feels biased. Rison had admitted in People magazine to hitting her the night of the fire, but that was hardly the first time. In the feature titled “In The Heat of the Night: Andre Rison Still Loves Rapper Lisa Lopes Even Though She’s Charged with Torching His House,” Rison is characterized as a heartsick puppy, while Lopes comes off as “hot tempered” and a vengeful drunk. The lovesick Rison “cried a lot” and “still loves her,” and even contemplated suicide—swerving his motorcycle into the median. “Strong child-woman” Lopes, on the other hand, was getting the “crazy bitch” treatment.
That the relationship had been abusive was lost in much of the fire coverage. The reports instead focused on the spectacle—a bathtub of burning shoes, the smashed cars, a house in flames. They suggest that Lopes lit the fire with little provocation. The severity of the abuse is also downplayed. Perhaps it was Lopes’s spunky image, her alcoholism, and her pat refusal to be a victim that robbed her of a more sympathetic media narrative. She was sentenced to time in a halfway house, probation, and a $10,000 fine.
At a TLC concert in 2015, I met a former TLC backup dancer who calls himself KitKat (and now sells merch) who adored Lopes and commended her pluck. “She didn’t hold her tongue. She spoke her mind,” he told me. Others close to her said she fought back when Rison went after her. Maybe there was little discussion about whether Lopes was a victim because she didn’t “act like one.” She screamed, she drank, she destroyed Rison’s property, and she hit back. These things were all true and they no doubt complicated the depictions of her in the press. Lopes was a messy woman who let her anger show, and society didn’t know what to do with her. Besides, partner violence wasn’t anyone else’s business anyway. At the time, it was still thought to be a private matter.
Lopes herself pointed out this challenge. “It’s so backward. Andre is a hero, especially in Atlanta’s eyes . . . Forget the fact that I got my butt beat,” Lopes told Vibe magazine in 1994. “But when they saw my face all messed up, they didn’t talk about that the way they talked about the house.”
Fire jokes abounded. “No doubt Rison is hoping that this will be the last of Lisa’s burning ambitions,” quipped the Daily Record. “TLC burns up the charts and Lisa burns down the house,” cracked VH1. Meanwhile, the local papers reminded readers what a good football player Rison was. “There’s no denying Rison’s brilliance in play,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution praised. His boosters vindicated him. “Andre has some hellraiser in him, but he’s no hood, either,” a friend said. His problems were “usually only harmful to himself,” according to his supporters, and his arrest in the parking lot was considered “atypical,” since the charges were later dismissed. Rison was softened into a “mama’s boy,” but Rison’s mother did not hold her tongue about Lopes. “She’s either going to jail or a mental institution,” she said.
After the fire, a Vibe magazine reporter spent time with TLC to determine whether or not they were the crazy bitches everyone said they were. “After almost three days of shopping, eating, talking, and chilling with TLC, I fail to see any visible signs of insane bitchiness,” she reported. But Lopes’s troubles besmirched the whole group, who became “the number one bad girls of pop.” They leaned into this caricature to push their sophomore album, CrazySexyCool, released five months after the fire. Each adjective in the album’s title was meant to describe a woman in the group, and it’s no mystery which one was ascribed to Lopes. The album was a runaway success, anointing TLC the first girl group to sell more than ten million albums. CrazySexyCool would remain on the Billboard 200 for two years.
Many believe Lopes was the creative and artistic fuel of the trio. She is the only group member with writing credits on the debut album. Her raps have a bouncy, youthful quality that distinguishes the group’s sound. Theirs is a blend of hip-hop, soul, and R&B that few girl groups had melded before and none to such explosive commercial success. Her spark is what was absent as TLC has reunited to perform again in recent years. While TLC fans supported the comeback, it’s lost on no one that the band is eternally incomplete. Lopes was killed in a car accident in Honduras in 2002.
At a 2015 Madison Square Garden reunion show, the audience is mostly composed of women in their thirties and forties, with some millennials sprinkled in. TLC satisfies fans by playing all of their old favorites, but each song sounds exactly like it did then—no creative variations or stylings. The only new song they play is from their 2013 comeback VH1 biopic. They sing it for less than thirty seconds. “It felt like they were put on pause in the late 90s and they just pushed play,” says one attendee.
Rather than hire a singer for Lopes’s parts, they pipe her prerecorded vocals into their songs. They dedicate “Waterfalls” to her, the song that marketed her struggles and warned about HIV/AIDS. It contains Lopes’s signature rap verse about seeing a rainbow while leaving rehab for alcohol abuse. In the carefully constructed narrative of the band relayed to fans now, writing this verse for this song is the highlight of Lopes’s life.
As the remaining two performers sing “Waterfalls,” the jumbotron plays the music video of the threesome shimmying atop an empty blue ocean for full nostalgic effect. The costly video boasted jaw-dropping special effects at the time, but now it looks dated. T-Boz and Chilli ask the audience to “light it up” for Left Eye, and the dark arena is suddenly dotted with smartphone flashbulbs. “This is nice,” says one audience member of the tribute, “but remember when she burned down that guy’s house?”
BLUE-CHIP BITCH
Few characters on television were more hated than the blue-chip bitch of Beverly Hills, 90210. Loathing Shannen Doherty—who played Brenda Walsh—became an intense, active pastime for many teenage girls in the 90s. By the show’s second season, Brenda is no longer its moral compass, protecting friends against date rape and outing shoplifters. Instead, she goes full entitled teen, deploying snideness and tantrums when she doesn’t get what she wants. Her purpose on the show shifts to securing access to boys—namely, Dylan. Toward this end, she sasses her parents, throws jealous fits, and wallows in self-pity.
90210 fans blasted hatred at both the actress and her character, who they conflated during the height of the show’s popularity. Brenda was “a monster,” “a real horror,” and “increasingly petulant,” but Doherty the actress got it worse. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Doherty had a reputation for “snobbery, hostility and general brattiness.” Others called her “abrasive,” “flinty,” “bitchy,” and “selfish.” Her first notable film role as a mean girl in the Winona Ryder vehicle Heathers further solidified her bitch image.
Doherty was the ultimate difficult woman. Glamour magazine named her “Prima Donna of the Year” in 1992. A Sassy profile called her “Shannen Doherty, pathetic loser,” and she was booed at the Billboard Music Awards. She was reportedly financially unstable, bouncing checks, defaulting on credit cards, and stiffing her landlords. Rumor had it that s
he washed her hair with Evian.
After Doherty was arrested for misdemeanor battery at a nightclub and for DUI on the road, she became a poster girl for female rage. She allegedly brawled with fellow cast members. Their anonymous snipes appeared in print. One said, “She’s the same bitch she always was.” Another defended the cast but belittled her: “One bad apple shouldn’t spoil the whole bunch.”
Brenda hate became a cottage industry. Twenty-something Kerin Morataya organized a national cohort to lobby against the actress called the I Hate Brenda Club. Morataya called Doherty “the type of woman that I strive not to be—quick to judge, inconsiderate and very selfish.” She threatened that the club would “not stop until Brenda is off the air.” Morataya received at least ten calls a day to the “Brenda Snitch Line,” a hotline for talking shit. The club produced and sold out of thousands of copies of the I Hate Brenda Newsletter, a “wonderfully nasty tattle sheet full of spurious tales and rude doings,” praised the Baltimore Sun. The club founders created “I Hate Brenda” T-shirts and bumper stickers, a music album called Hating Brenda, and a band to perform the songs. The club received gleeful coverage in many newspapers and magazines, and solidified many 90210 superfans’ feelings that the show’s protagonist was a real-life bitch.
Doherty laughed off the criticism and called charges against her specious. “Do I look like a girl who would bitch slap somebody?” she asked Howard Stern. She joked about the Evian water rumor—“How do you get your hair totally clean that way?”—but nobody laughed. She didn’t seem to get the memo about the importance of female-character likability. “I’m not saying I don’t have my moments of bitchiness because everybody has them. But it’s never for no reason,” she explained. SNL spoofed how deeply she was hated in the 1993 sketch “Salem Bitch Trial.” Doherty plays a woman sentenced to death for practicing “Bitchcraft.” “Why is it when a man speaketh his mind, he’s admired and made judge? But when a woman displays forthrightness, she’s accused of being a bitch?” she asks. “Your words would sway greatly more had they not been delivered in such a bitchy manner!” retorts the governor in charge of her fate. “You shall be burned!”
Doherty’s youth, beauty, and refusal to apologize for outbursts fueled the contempt. Progressives didn’t like her Republican leanings, which began as a young Southern Baptist growing up in Memphis, Tennessee. Two ex-fiancés were two too many. Reports emphasized what a bad influence she was on fellow cast member Tori Spelling, who upset her famous father by copying Doherty’s “hard-partying” ways. Doherty reportedly started a fistfight with fellow cast member Jennie Garth while on set.
NO SAINT
Like Lopes, Doherty was no saint. Both of her ex-fiancés alleged assault—though one, who was the heir to Max Factor cosmetics, admitted in court to slapping her. In a People magazine article focused on Doherty’s abusive behavior, her father claimed that her fiancé, Dean Jay Factor, was the one abusing her.
“He initiated the charge, but she’s the victim,” he said. Factor had filed a domestic violence restraining order against Doherty, claiming she threatened to shoot him and he feared for his life. Partner violence perpetrated by a woman was so surprising that the media didn’t know what to make of it. For both Doherty and Lopes, their violent behavior caused the press to villainize them while softening the focus on their significant others. Reckless aggression seemed to have graver consequences for the women than it did for the men.
Projecting the image of a train wreck earned Doherty national condemnation, but by scuttling the likable, fuckable, nice-girl identity, Doherty was exhibiting a kind of power. What critics seemed to want most from Doherty was deference. They wanted her to apologize for being a diva, and to mollify fans.
Self-righteous columns advised Doherty on how to extinguish her track record of horrid press. “Shock your public: Say you’re sorry!” and “Lighten up!” they counseled. These critiques reeked of a particular brand of fandom that dovetails with narcissism—that an actress owed her followers a certain kind of likability, and that she should care about what they thought of her personal life. When Playboy reportedly offered $300,000 for a Doherty pictorial, the prude police called it an “undistinguished honor” she’d share with trash like La Toya Jackson, Mimi Rogers, and Vanna White. When she did it anyway, Howard Stern shamed her on his show. “Baby, don’t get crazy,” he chided. “There isn’t a guy here that doesn’t want to bang you. You can’t possibly be insecure,” he said, as if her self-worth hinged on her fuckability.
Doherty seemed to not care that people called her horrible names and wanted to sabotage her success. Like Lopes, she was accused of unseemly anger and violence. In this way, she occupied male space by goading her enemies to despise her more. The more people hated Doherty, the bitchier she seemed to get. By not capitulating to scolding or judgment and dismissing her enemies’ hate, Doherty wielded a unique kind of agency for Hollywood.
Doherty left 90210 in 1994, and seemed to all but disappear until producer Aaron Spelling cast her in his drama about three sexy witch sisters, Charmed, which premiered in 1998. Critics cackled at the perfect casting—her bad-girl status had earned her the villainess role. Only playing a witch could bring back Doherty from what seemed like forced retirement. But she left that show, too, after just three seasons, amid another rumored feud with a cast member.
8
Manly
Since the 90s, we’ve learned a lot more about anger, specifically how men are rewarded for it while women are penalized. A 2015 study of gender and anger published in the journal Law and Human Behavior found that when men and women made the same arguments, men gained influence when angry, while women’s influence diminished. Jessica Salerno, a study author, said anger made men seem “credible,” while it made women seem “emotional.” This was the case for Doherty, Lopes, Cole, and countless other women who attempted to claim power through anger in the 90s. Powerful women were threatening—angry women most of all—and the culture suppressed them through bitchification.
But some women were so angry, subversive, and threatening that they were not so easily subdued by ordinary bitchification. To stop these women, critics in the media and popular culture performed virtual gender-reassignment surgery—crafting male identities for women who undermined cultural mores about femininity and women’s place in society.
Roseanne Barr was one such woman. In fact, you could argue that Roseanne Barr was the most hated woman in America in the early 90s. She was loud, crude, brash, and overweight. She was ambitious, and refused to acknowledge her critics, or take orders from network bosses who had green-lit her hit sitcom, Roseanne. Her following was built on the fiction that the actress and character were the same person. A former waitress, ex-prostitute, and mom to three kids, Barr had lived the life the show presented—one with a lot of bad road under her.
Roseanne premiered within a month of Murphy Brown in 1988. Since there were so few strong women leads with shows built around them, audiences were forced to pick sides—coiffed careerist or pudgy rugrat wrangler? Both were “tough, outspoken women who suffer neither fools nor male machismo with any trace of grace,” and “drawn as extremes” since they were so “cutting edge,” declared the Chicago Tribune.
Murphy was the aggressor in the office; Roseanne was the beast at home. While Murphy appealed to the elite “highly paid professional woman” whom Dan Quayle had chastised, Roseanne Conner was her working-class, overweight, Midwestern cousin who clipped coupons in frumpy sweats. She was a mash-up of spitfire and clown—crafting balloon animals, then gleefully popping them. Murphy worked to keep it together in a man’s world, while Roseanne exposed domestic bliss as anything but.
Bergen and Barr were often both nominated for awards in the same categories. Murphy Brown ran for ten years; Roseanne for nine, ending in 1997. But while Bergen looked and behaved like the goddess movie star that she is, Barr more often looked and acted like a hot mess. This made her efforts on the show more credible, but also etched a bull’s
-eye on her back.
What irked Roseanne’s critics most wasn’t her transgressions as a working mom, but as a woman. For one thing, she was overweight, which America detests in women because it undermines traditional beauty standards and projects a lack of ladylike control. Barr stood for “all that we most loathe,” according to commentators, with dirty hair, a potty mouth, and a frame that “unapologetically vacillates between being fat and very fat,” professed the New York Times. She was “Quasimodo on a bad night, a bowling ball in search of an alley,” said one critic in the Chicago Tribune. The comic, of course, brilliantly played to these barbs. When a Guardian reporter dines with her, Roseanne says she’s “trying to overfeed.” “Takes a lot of discipline to get 2,500 calories in there no matter how painful it is,” she tells him.
Barr rejected femininity, and her shtick pummeled its trappings. That she was so harshly rebuked made it clear that critics still held her to a standard that her show mocked. Barr was said to “make many prominent feminists uneasy . . . because she’s not terribly, well, feminine,” as if heels and pearls were feminist credentials. But her in-your-face attitude and masculine swagger were exactly the opposite of characteristics that 90s women were encouraged by society and industry to embrace. If strident, militant, bitchy Roseanne was a feminist, then I’ll join a different club, thank you very much. Throughout the show, her character’s husband, played by John Goodman, calls her the floral “Rosie” without irony. Barr’s signature joke remains to this day: People say I’m not feminine. Well, suck my dick.
THE MOST HATED WOMAN IN AMERICA
“Why do you think that everyone thinks that you’re the good one and I’m the bad one?” Courtney Love asks her husband, Kurt Cobain, in their Los Angeles apartment in the spring of 1992. The footage appears in the documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. They are wearing bath towels and seem high. Love says that if Cobain cheated on her, she would gain two hundred pounds and become the most hated woman in America. “You’re already the most hated woman in America,” he tells her. “You and Roseanne Barr are tied.”
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