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From Vox
Texas’s anti-abortion law is back at SCOTUS. Here’s what’s different this time around. -
Women’s groups organized marches across the country to protest SB 8, a Texas law banning most abortions. | Yana Paskova/Getty Images
The Biden administration’s last-ditch bid to restore abortion rights in Texas, explained.
On October 14, the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit formally blocked a trial court’s decision halting SB 8, a Texas law banning most abortions in that state. On Monday, the US Justice Department, which sued to halt the Texas law, sought review ofthe Fifth Circuit’s thinly reasoned, single-paragraph order in the Supreme Court.
But there are some important legal distinctions between the current challenge to SB 8, known as United States v. Texas, and the Court’s previous order in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson allowing SB 8 to take effect. Specifically, the Justice Department argues in its request for relief that the United States is allowed to sue Texas directly, even if private parties may not.
The Texas law was specifically drafted to evade judicial review. Ordinarily, a plaintiff who wishes to challenge a state law in federal court must sue the state official charged with enforcing that law. If a state law requires police to block access to abortion clinics, for example, a clinic might sue the chief of police charged with carrying out this law.
But SB 8, written to sidestep that kind of legal challenge, explicitly forbids any “officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity” in Texas from enforcing it. The idea is that, if no state official can enforce the law, abortion rights plaintiffs have no one to sue.
Instead, SB 8 permits “any person” who is not an employee of the state to file a lawsuit against anyone who performs an abortion or who “aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” Victorious plaintiffs collect a bounty of at least $10,000 from any such defendant.
This scheme, as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his dissenting opinion in Whole Woman’s Health, “is not only unusual, but unprecedented.” As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, the law is “engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny,”
And yet, in Whole Woman’s Health, the five most conservative justices effectively blessed this attempt to frustrate judicial review. Although it is possible that the Court will strike down SB 8 at a later date (most likely after it has hobbled or even eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion in its Dobbs decision), the Court’s order in Whole Woman’s Health claims that it is not “clear whether, under existing precedent, this Court can issue an injunction” against the state law.
Rather than resolve that uncertainty, moreover, the five anti-abortion justices in the majority simply allowed SB 8 to take effect.
The new challenge from the DOJ argues that, at least in an unusual case such as this one, the United States should be allowed to sue the state of Texas — and that it should be able to do so specifically because no one else can. As Judge Robert Pitman, who briefly blocked SB 8 before his decision was stayed by the Fifth Circuit, summarized the DOJ’s argument, the United States should be allowed to step in when “(1) a state law violates the constitution, (2) that state action has a widespread effect, and (3) the state law is designed to preclude review by the very people whose rights are violated.”
Again, this argument is unlikely to prevail in the same Supreme Court that handed down the order in Whole Woman’s Health. A majority of the justices appear quite happy with a world where, at least for now, no one can sue to block SB 8.
But the Justice Department’s arguments that the United States can act as a kind of plaintiff of last resort are, at least, plausible under the Supreme Court’s existing precedents.
The DOJ faces two legal obstacles in its lawsuit against Texas
The problem created by SB 8, and by the Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health, is that, if the United States cannot sue, there will be no viable way to challenge SB 8 in court.
There’s no serious question that SB 8 is unconstitutional under existing Supreme Court precedents. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey(1992), the Court held that the Constitution protects “the right of the woman to choose to have an abortion before viability and to obtain it without undue interference from the state.” “Viability” refers to the moment when a fetus could live outside the womb.
SB 8 effectively forbids abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, long before the point of viability. Thus, so long as Casey remains good law, the only real legal question in the Texas lawsuit is whether the United States is allowed to sue the state. In order to do so, it must overcome two hurdles.
First, like anyone who brings a federal lawsuit, the federal government must show that it has “standing” to challenge SB 8 — meaning that the United States needs to demonstrate that it is injured in some way by the Texas law.
This problem, however, should be easily overcome. As Judge Pitman explained in his opinion, various federal laws require the United States to assist people who need abortions. Prison regulations provide that medical officials in federal prisons “shall arrange for an abortion to take place” when a pregnant inmate requests one. Under certain circumstances, the Defense Department is required to provide abortions. Medicaid may be required to cover medically necessary abortions.
But, under SB 8, federal officials who fulfill these legal obligations can be sued and potentially forced to pay bounties. And the federal government will have to pay for the cost of transporting at least some abortion patients in Texas across state lines. That’s enough to establish standing.
The second and more difficult question is why the federal government should be the plaintiff of last resort. DOJ rests the lion’s share of its argument on Inre Debs (1895), a Gilded Age decision giving federal courts simply extraordinary authority to halt union activities that disrupt interstate commerce (Debs arose out of a massive railroad strike that threw shipping in the Midwest into disarray).
Debs suggests that the federal government must have the power to assert its own interests in federal court, even when no federal law authorizes it to do so. “Every government, entrusted, by the very terms of its being, with powers and duties to be exercised and discharged for the general welfare,” the Court explained, “has a right to apply to its own courts for any proper assistance in the exercise of the one and the discharge of the other.”
Though Debs conceded that the federal government may not file a lawsuit to “interfere in any mere matter of private controversy between individuals,” it permitted suits “whenever the wrongs complained of are such as affect the public at large, and are in respect of matters which by the Constitution are entrusted to the care of the Nation, and concerning which the Nation owes the duty to all the citizens of securing to them their common rights.”
The DOJ argues that these conditions are met because, if the DOJ cannot sue to block SB 8, there will be no one to secure “common rights” protected by the Constitution. “Just as the United States could sue in Debs to eliminate a grave threat to its sovereign interest in the free flow of interstate commerce,” the Justice Department argues in its brief to the justices, “it may sue here to eliminate S.B. 8’s grave threat to the supremacy of federal law and the traditional mechanisms of judicial review.”
Ordinarily, if a state law permitted private parties to sue abortion providers in state court, those providers could wait to be sued, and then argue that the law permitting them to be sued is unconstitutional during that state court proceeding. But SB 8 is designed to frustrate this normal process as well. For one thing, it contains a simply extraordinary provision stating that SB 8 defendants may not assert their “belief that the requirements of this subchapter are unconstitutional or were unconstitutional” as a defense in state court.
Even setting aside that provision, the mere threat of SB 8 lawsuits is enough to prevent abortion clinics from violating this unconstitutional law. Because the law allows literally any person who is not employed by the state of Texas to file such a suit, an abortion provider (or even someone who is falsely suspected of being an abortion provider), could be inundated with thousands of lawsuits, brought by plaintiffs from across the globe, and filed in any number of Texas state courts.
To defend against so many suits, a provider would likely need to hire a small army of lawyers — all at considerable expense. And if they lost just one suit, SB 8 permits the prevailing plaintiff to collect a bounty of “not less than $10,000 for each abortion that the defendant performed or induced in violation of this subchapter.” There is no upper limit to this bounty, so a judge could conceivably force a provider to pay millions of dollars for a single violation.
SB 8, in other words, effectively punishes people suspected of performing abortions (or anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion) by subjecting them to potentially crippling legal fees before any court has even determined that they violated the law. And the law also prohibits defendants from recouping their attorney’s fees. The mere fact that someone impoverished by legal bills might eventually be able to argue in state court that SB 8 is unconstitutional offers no real relief.
So the DOJ makes an entirely plausible argument that permitting it to sue Texas is essential to vindicate the supremacy of the federal Constitution — a Constitution that, at least for now, is understood by binding Supreme Court precedent to protect abortion rights. But there’s no reason to think that the DOJ’s argument will convince the five justices who joined the majority in Whole Woman’s Health.
These justices already endorsed a regime where the right to an abortion goes unprotected within Texas’s borders. Why would they reverse course now?
A possible middle ground
Although this Court is unlikely to protect abortion rights, there are still potent reasons why even anti-abortion justices should oppose SB 8. For one thing, if Texas can offer bounties to anti-abortion plaintiffs — and evade judicial review in the process — other, bluer states could pass copycat laws. Do the justices really want New York to pass a law permitting “any person” to collect a bounty from gun owners?
Similarly, as explained above, SB 8 potentially imposes extraordinarily expensive legal fees on people who are suspected of performing an abortion, even if they didn’t actually perform an abortion.
Suppose, for example, that a false rumor circulates on Twitter that Dr. Jane Smith performed an abortion in Austin, Texas, when, in fact, Dr. Smith has never performed an abortion in her life. Under SB 8, Dr. Smith could be bombarded with hundreds or even thousands of lawsuits — enough that the legal costs of defending against these suits would bankrupt her.
I don’t have any illusions that this Supreme Court will hold that doctors who perform abortions cannot be punished. But I’d hope that we could all agree that doctors who are falsely accused of violating a state law should not be punished. If due process means anything, it should mean that Dr. Smith should get her day in court before she is forced into bankruptcy.
On Twitter, University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck proposed a possible solution to this problem. If the Court isn’t willing to block SB 8, it should at least decide whether to strike down SB 8 at the same time that it is considering Dobbs.
Now that the Fifth Circuit has (again) showed its hand, #SCOTUS should treat DOJ’s forthcoming application to vacate the stay in US v. Texas as a petition for cert before judgment, grant it and the providers’ pending petition, and have them argued alongside Dobbs in December.
Vladeck’s approach would allow the Court to excise SB 8 even if it also nullifies the constitutional right to an abortion at the same time — and the Court handed down a brief order on Monday suggesting that it may be inclined to do as Vladeck suggests. That way, there won’t be copycat laws targeting other constitutional rights. And there won’t be waves of lawsuits based solely on things like online rumors.
The author whose story inspired Netflix’s Maid on why welfare is broken -
Margaret Qualley as Alex in Netflix’s Maid, based on the memoir of the same title by Stephanie Land. | Ricardo Hubbs/Neflix
How Stephanie Land went from Vox article to book deal to Netflix show.
When Stephanie Land moved out of her abusive boyfriend’s house at age 29, she was a single mother, unemployed, with no savings and no college degree. So she did what she had to in order to keep herself and her daughter alive. She moved into a homeless shelter and then into subsidized housing, enrolled in every government program she could, and got a job as a maid. It was all only barely enough to keep her going.
Land eventually drew on the back- breaking, grueling experience of cleaning houses for an essay that she would publish on Vox in 2015. Titled “I spent 2 years cleaning houses. What I saw makes me never want to be rich,” the piece went massively viral. It was full of voyeuristic details about what Land learned about her clients from cleaning their homes, and in its descriptions of the difference between Land’s precarious existence and her clients’ lavish lifestyles, it seemed like a perfect encapsulation of the US’s ever-widening income inequality. To date, it’s garnered over 1.3 million page views.
With Maid now streaming, Land returned to Vox for some full-circle perspective. Over the phone, we discussed the failure of the welfare system in the US, why her experience publishing with Vox in 2015 was not wholly great, and why the narrative of a poor white woman is so attractive to Hollywood. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.
One of the things that both your book and the Netflix show are so good at laying out is the incredible number of hoops you have to jump through to receive government assistance. What were some of the biggest frustrations you had to deal with during your time in the system?
Honestly, it was child care. The last time I tried to get a child care grant, my youngest daughter was 1. It was probably in 2015, right around when the Vox article came out. I had been freelancing for a little while.
You have to hand in three months of income, and they do their calculations. And it turned out that I was $100 over the limit for [continuing my] child care grant.
When my caseworker told me that, I was just kind of like, “Really? Like, for 100 bucks?”
My income at the time was so variable. I was extremely honest with my income, and as a self-employed person I could have lied a little bit, but I didn’t.
And so when I was talking to [my caseworker], she said, “Well, it looks like your work hours are from 9 at night to 2 in the morning, so you don’t really need day care.”
I said, “Well, that’s not ideal!” I would much rather work during the day and not lose that amount of sleep.
It’s the child care grants. I mean, I was audited. They called me and threatened to remove my child care grant immediately because I had handed in a handwritten pay stub at one point. It’s terrifying, because I can’t work without child care, and that was the most important thing that I had.
The book does a really great job of laying out that problem. You describe having to choose between child care and the work that you need to do to survive. So what do you think needs to change about the way we approach child care in America so that people don’t have to keep making those kinds of choices?
I argue for universal child care all the time. I think they’re trying to cover that in the infrastructure bill that they’re trying to pass. Child care is part of the infrastructure of our country, because parents need to have a safe place to bring their children while they’re working. It’s just as important as the road that they’re driving on.
It was such a struggle just to have that support. It was baffling to me. And it’s all wrapped up in work requirements. I never really understood why I constantly had to prove that I was working. It just seemed like my value and my worth as a human being were completely wrapped up in how many hours I was working a week at a very low-wage job.
That’s something that you also write about in the book and that comes out in the show as well. This sort of sense of judgment that you get from strangers and even from close friends who would say things like, “Oh, you’re welcome,” about receiving government assistance. There seems to be a lot of people who have this idea that people on welfare are just lazy and taking advantage of hardworking taxpayers. So what do you wish that people who had that idea understood about the experience?
The SNAP program is such a small part of the federal budget. It’s something like 1.3 percent. It’s such a small amount, but because it is so visible, people kind of feel personal about it. When I pull out my SNAP card at the grocery store, people start to look at all the things that I’m buying, like, “Oh my god, she got blueberries! Those are $5. Why didn’t you just get grapes?”
They feel some kind of connection because they believe that their tax dollars are buying me organic milk.
Another thing that’s really quite haunting about your experience, and that I think the Netflix show does a really great job of evoking, is just how much time and mental energy gets taken up keeping track of a budget when you’re making minimum wage. What was the hardest part of making that money stretch?
A lot of it was just being able to afford toiletries and tampons and toilet paper. I remember very specifically standing in the grocery store aisle. I really needed to buy a sponge, and I was trying to think, “How much money do I have on my credit card balance?” Because usually I would pay the minimum payment on my credit card, and that was the money that I had to purchase all of those things like toothpaste and shampoo and diapers if I needed them.
So that’s one memory that I have, of just trying to figure out if I could purchase a $2 sponge that I needed, and deciding that I couldn’t.
It’s also really striking, looking at this story, how much our system seems to incentivize survivors of domestic violence to stay in relationships that can be damaging, and the way it keeps pushing people to fall back on their existing personal connections, which might not be the most healthy. What do you think needs to change in our system to move away from that model?
I think emotional abuse needs to be recognized as violence. It’s domestic violence, and it’s deadly.
Once emotional abuse really takes hold, you are controlled in almost every way. Abusers will most often turn you against all of your friends and family and isolate you. They will take away your self- worth, and they financially control you. They control your phone, your vehicle, just everything. And that’s when the physical abuse starts to happen.
Often up until that point, you don’t believe that you’re in an abusive relationship because they haven’t hit you. And then they start hitting things near you, but that’s still “not really domestic violence” until you have bruises.
For me in that situation, not only did the court system tell me that a reasonable person wouldn’t feel threatened, they saw me as the bad person because I was removing a child from a stable environment and a stable home. My abuser was seen as the better parent because he had a house and a full-time job and had resources, and I was homeless.
In the book, you write about the sheer physical pain that comes with cleaning houses, and how that can be exacerbated by a lack of medical benefits. How common is it for house cleaners not to get any basic benefits?
I don’t know how every cleaning company handles their employees, but as far as I know just from talking to agents with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, it’s incredibly common to not have any kind of benefits whatsoever.
If you’re working for a cleaning company, your pay is usually cut in half. They will charge a client what they charge, but then they will pay you a very low amount. What comes with that is insurance, so if you are hurt or if you damage something, then you have the company to pay for all of that. But you also risk losing your job if you mess up in any way.
And then if you go on to be self-employed, you don’t have that safety net of workers comp, or even unemployment insurance if you lose your job, like so many domestic workers did at the beginning of the pandemic.
You’re also just so vulnerable. I remember going to really shady places. Sometimes there was no cellphone coverage. I was a single mom and I had just dropped my kid off at day care and she was sick, and there was no way for anybody to contact me. And I also didn’t know what kind of situation I was going into. It’s pretty scary.
There’s no sick pay, there’s no vacation days, and there’s just nothing for you if you get injured.
Then you also write about having to pay for your own gas and cleaning supplies and other equipment. How does that end up cutting into the paycheck?
I was making at one point $9.25 an hour. I did the math and figured out it was actually about $6 an hour with all the gas. And I had to wash my own cleaning rags and the clothes that I worked in, and that wasn’t covered in my paycheck either.
At one point, I finally made enough of a stink that they offered me a little bit of pay for mileage, and then my boss offered to wash my rags. But that was after six months of struggling and finally just saying, “I can’t afford to do this.”
On top of the low wages and physical pain, there’s also having to deal with the way clients treated you. We see a lot of disdain for people who clean houses in popular culture — I’m thinking of the influencer Rachel Hollis, who was heavily criticized a few months ago for referring to her house cleaner as “the woman who cleans my toilets.” What is it like for you, having done that work, to see that sort of sneering, dehumanizing attitude playing out in the culture at large?
I think that’s the reason why I can’t bring myself to hire my own house cleaner. I felt that so much.
I remember one time I went to clean a person’s house who was the same age as me. They had a really nice place and a couple of kids, and their kids’ bedrooms were just immaculate and like something that I wished for my own kid. And as she was walking me through, she pointed to a couple of spots that I had missed on a light switch. She said, “Can you just make sure that you get this next time?”
I just remember thinking, “Really? You’re going to point that out to me?”
It was just so demeaning. I mean, every single time that I had to get on my hands and knees to scrub something and the client was home, it was just a really horrible feeling. There were times that I would be cleaning, and the client was home and they answered the phone and they said, “Oh I can’t talk, the maid is here.” It was a really odd feeling.
I wish that type of work held the same amount of dignity that [my clients’] work did. I’m not really sure why it doesn’t. Because domestic work is the work that makes all the other work in this country happen.
In 2015, you published a piece on cleaning houses for Vox. Then in 2019, you published the book. And now it’s a Netflix series. Can you walk me through what happened to get you from one to the other?
The Vox essay was my first big paycheck as a freelance writer. It was something that I had worked on in college and beyond. I saw a call for pitches through another publication, I think it was Literary Mama. They put out an email that said these people are looking for personal essays.
So I emailed Vox and entitled it “Dear Editor,” and sent them a couple of paragraphs that I thought were really good. And they emailed back immediately and offered me $500. That was like the most money I’d ever seen. I was just falling all over myself.
The morning that it was published online, my friend actually called me on my flip phone and said, “Are you okay?”
And I said, “Yeah, why?”
And she said, “You need to go look at your computer.”
That essay went so viral. I really wasn’t set up for that amount of virality. I started getting hundreds and hundreds of emails through the contact form on my website, and they were all so angry.
I was called dumb. God, what did they call me? They called me a roach. They called me a bum. A leech on society. I was called dirty a lot.
That essay was edited to make me a very unlikable character. At the time I was just like, “Fine, whatever. Just pay me my money!” But now that I have some experience, I definitely would have pushed back on some of those edits. [The editor of Land’s essay is no longer employed at Vox.]
I received hate mail for so long and at such magnitude that I remember going out for a walk in the woods with a friend of mine and feeling so exposed and raw. It just really affected me.
But on the other hand, an agent from New York reached out to me that morning and asked me if I had a book in the works and I lied and said yes. I wrote up a couple of chapters and a book proposal, and we had a book deal 11 months later.
After that, every time I pitched an editor and included a link to that essay, they said, “Oh my goodness, you’re the woman behind the house-cleaning essay!” My freelancing career really took off after that.
I still get hate mail from that essay every once in a while.
Oh god, I’m so sorry you had to deal with that. So you get this book deal. And then how does that become a Netflix deal?
I have a wonderful agent at CAA, Michelle Crows, and she sent out advance copies of the book. So I ended up talking to different groups of producers and directors and people who were interested in this story.
John Wells and Margot Robbie were my last call. Up until that point, a lot of people really wanted to do a straight adaptation of the book. And to me, that sounded horrible. Because it’s such a white person story, and it’s such a privileged story. In memoir, you’re tied to your experience, and I was very isolated. I didn’t talk to anybody. I kept thinking about the movie trailer guy saying, “One white woman dipped into poverty — and how she got herself out.”
John Wells and Margot Robbie proposed fictionalizing it, and bringing in a really diverse cast, and making the story look like the real world does. I love that, and so that was why I went with them.
I’m glad you brought that up because I know you’ve written about how the ways we talk about poverty can feed into a lot of ideas about systemic racism. For instance, the way we talk about poor Black people as welfare queens, and all of the political baggage around the idea of the white working class. I don’t think this is necessarily present in the book, but you can see a way in which the idea of a white single mother is politically attractive to certain agendas in a way that it might not be if it were the story of a woman of color who is having to navigate this treacherous system. Is that disconnect something that you’ve seen in the reception of this story?
It’s something that I talk about every chance I get. I knew right off the bat that my story was very attractive to publishers because it was marketable. I am a very palatable and very likable poor person because I am white. I could look like your cousin or your neighbor for a lot of the population who purchases memoirs and reads these books.
Going into that, I had a moment of realizing that I was being lifted up. And what am I going to do with that? So even though I am a pretty shy introvert, I realized that they’re listening to me. And because they’re listening to me, then hopefully that will open up space for other people to share their stories.
We don’t listen to people of color. We especially don’t listen to people who are in systemic poverty or systemic racism, which go hand in hand. And we especially don’t listen to people who are still in that situation and who are angry.
One thing that I’ve seen on social media that honestly really encourages me is that people are angry, and they’re talking about their anger, for that thing that you’re talking about: It’s a white woman’s story who’s being lifted, when the majority of domestic workers are women of color. I’m grateful that they are able to talk about that anger. I want them to have space to talk about how angry they are about the systems that are in place that keep them in poverty.
I talk a lot about how the government assistance program is broken. But it is almost impossible if you’re a person of color in this country or you’re an immigrant.
What is the biggest thing that you hope people who read the book and watch the show take away from them?
I hope they gain some empathy for people who are in poverty, especially the people who are experiencing homelessness. I think we have this idea in our heads that it’s always the person who is sleeping on a sidewalk, when that’s really not the case. There are many, many families in this country who are sleeping in their vehicles and taking their kids to school and going to work. And it’s a real tragedy.
I hope that people start to realize that and have some compassion, and take that compassion with them when they go to the voting booth. And vote some people into office who have lived experience in the margins, or have empathy for those who do.
The chaotic, irreplaceable Wendy Williams -
Wendy Williams speaks onstage during her celebration of 10 years of The Wendy Williams Show at the Buckhead Theatre, in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2018. | Paras Griffin/Getty Images
Wendy Williams’s rise, reputation, and absence from her talk show, explained.
Centuries ago, those accused of gossip, primarily women, were locked into metal headpieces that restrained the mouth. Imagine what those medieval haters would think about Wendy Williams.
The 57-year-old host has been rattling off her opinions into millions of American living rooms since 2008. The Wendy Williams Show kicks off its 13th season this month. After several delays due to medical complications from Williams’s ongoing thyroid condition and a Covid-19 infection, guest hosts and panelists will occupy Williams’s seat for the foreseeable future.
Season 13 was scheduled to begin on September 20, then was suddenly pushed back to October 4. In an Instagram statement, it was announced that Williams had tested positive for a “breakthrough case” of Covid-19. This came as a surprise to many of her fans, since she had previously been outspoken about not wanting to get vaccinated. (Even the controversial Dr. Oz tried to convince her to get the shot.) Then, the premiere got pushed back again to October 18, but by October 12, her team released another statement announcing that Williams would not be returning, as she remains under daily medical supervision. The Wendy Williams Show did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
However necessary, the guest hosts are an attempt to replace the irreplaceable — Williams’s ranking as a top daytime host has long been solid, competing only with the soon-to-depart Ellen DeGeneres and the women of The View. The guests who will take over her airtime are merely a stopgap, and are being met with mixed feelings in Williams’s Instagram comments, where her loyal fans have been vocal throughout her latest bout of health issues.
For over a decade between smirking laughter and sips from her mug, Williams has calmly eviscerated celebrity goings-on, razing their mishaps to the ground to lay at the feet of her live studio audience. She has kept her original mission through changing times and through her own struggles. Even early on, her penchant for showing no mercy was documented by the New York Times, in a 2008 article that described her as capable of being “startlingly mean-spirited.” This is what helped her amass a legion of fans, and also what has irritated her critics for so long; of late, the infractions have piled up.
The tide has turned on the kind of lurid gossip Williams traffics in; just look at the way the pop culture news cycle of the early aughts is being reevaluated. Still, her mix of bravado and vulnerability keeps her on our screens. Who is this woman anyway, and who let her onstage?
Wendy Williams built her career on saying things other people wouldn’t say
Williams, born in New Jersey, got her start in radio in the late 1980s. She worked her way up through DC- and New York-based stations, and by 1993 had earned a Billboard Radio Award, honoring her as the R&B Major Market Radio Air Personality of the Year. She gave her listeners candid advice and shared the details of her own life dramas. Williams was known for her fiery, unapologetic personality. According to a 2005 New York magazine profile, during her run at WBLS, her interns were instructed not to speak to her unless spoken to. She bounced around different stations into the 2000s, discussing pop and rap stars on-air. She’s also struggled publicly: with being fired and ostracized, with a cheating husband who was also her manager, with substance abuse issues and her chronic illnesses.
Williams made a name for herself by getting immensely personal with her listeners, which is perhaps why her fanbase is so enamored with her. Marie Nerestant, a 43-year-old in New York City, has been a Wendy fan since high school. Now, she watches The Wendy Williams Show every single day while her kids are at school.
“She speaks her truth,” Nerestant told me about why she is drawn to Williams’s commentary. “She says what everybody wants to say, but is too afraid to say.” This, she theorizes, is why so many people are put off by Williams.
“She has her flaws, and she’s not afraid to say it. She has Graves’ disease. She has lymphedema. She went through a terrible divorce. She’s said everything. What else does she have to prove to anybody?”
Wendy hasn’t only spoken her own truth, though — and a fair share of celebrities have taken issue with Williams over the course of her career. In the ’90s, she had a habit of “outing” various rappers and pop stars, making claims that Sean Combs, Whitney Houston, and others were gay. These accusations were not taken lightly. Houston’s friend Robyn Crawford admitted that the pair planned to confront Williams over the gossip. Williams has also implied that Combs sent a girl group from his record label to assault her and intimated that he got her fired from Hot 97. Tupac even threw a diss at her in his music, after she made claims about his time in prison.
Despite the drama, Williams’s brashness attracted television execs, and in 2008 she was asked to do a trial run of her own syndicated talk show. It was a sweeping success. Immediately the show resonated, in particular with women between the ages of 18 and 54. Fox and BET jumped on the chance to broadcast the program, and the rest is history.
Her appeal to many Black women and gay men is crucial to her success, even though it is arguable that they should be most offended by her. And that is the strange magic of Wendy Williams.
Aside from her talk show, Williams has done standup, acted in movies, written books (fiction and nonfiction), and appeared in a Broadway production of Chicago. Just this past January, she simultaneously released a biopic and a documentary through Lifetime. Last fall, she was revealed as a performer on The Masked Singer, costumed as a big mouth, which is, well, pretty on the nose.
Williams’s daytime gig, however, is more than enough job for most. Her typically tireless schedule means that everyone with cable has likely come across her at some point or another. Stay-at-home mothers, children home sick, patients in doctors’ waiting rooms, and the like all cross paths with Wendy. Her celebrity gossip segment, aptly titled “Hot Topics,” dissects the latest entertainment news and might be the purest expression of the Wendy Williams persona. She talks, and the audience listens.
Williams’s fans love her, but they don’t always agree with her
The intimacy of The Wendy Williams Show is its main strength; Williams lounges in her purple armchair not just before her audience, but as if they’re sitting at the same table together. When she gossips, notoriously unscripted, it feels like chatting with a friend. She calls her fans her “co-hosts.”
While a host like Ellen DeGeneres speaks to celebrities the way a friend would, Williams speaks to and about them as if she is not also a celebrity. She has no issue prying or having guests on the show that she has previously gossiped about. She separates herself from the celebrity tribe and puts herself at the level of the viewer, ignoring the tension that might exist between her role and her own fame.
The format of The Wendy Williams Show has not changed much over time. Neither has its host, who remains often brutal toward celebrities. According to her fans, this is part of the appeal — but also, not always their favorite thing.
“I prefer when she keeps it light,” says Tracy Turner, a 54-year-old fan who watches Wendy a few times a week. For the past eight years, Turner has been tuning in to see what Williams has to say, whether it’s for her recurring celebrity lookalike segment or giving advice to audience members. What Turner is less interested in is when the commentary turns a little nasty, as in Williams’s unsolicited “advice” on the rocky relationship of Love & Hip-Hop stars Safaree Samuels and Erica Mena.
It seemed like a randomly fired shot, but in Turner’s opinion, there are some people who Williams just does not like, and it affects her coverage of them. “She used to come for the Kardashians, but then she met them, and then she changed the narrative,” Turner said. While Williams’s opinions can flip-flop — much to the annoyance of some of her fans — they also reflect a very human impulse. Her feelings are allowed to change, regardless of how forcibly she expresses them, even for, as Turner points out, sometimes indiscernible reasons. These shifts make her that much more unpredictable, which is compelling to those who have watched the nature of her fame change over time. When your audience doesn’t take you 100 percent seriously, it makes you much harder to cancel.
What follows is a brief synopsis of Wendy Williams’s most-cancelable hits: There was her explosive conversation with Whitney Houston in her radio days, where she asked Houston how her drug use affected her family (Williams has detailed her own issues with cocaine). Houston hung up on her. On the radio in 2006, Williams leaked that Method Man’s wife had cancer before some of the couple’s own family members even knew. She’s had to apologize for claiming that gay men “should leave skirts and heels to women.” When Terry Crews spoke out about being sexually assaulted, she said he was “not brave.”
In July, Williams implied that the marriage of actress and vegan influencer Tabitha Brown, who recently was able to help her husband financially so he could retire from the LAPD, was doomed to fail, and reminded Williams of her own situation with her ex-husband Kevin Hunter.
“That was out of anger. I don’t think she meant what she said,” Nerestant said. Perhaps Williams’s comments came from a place of projection due to her own romantic pains, Nerestant suggested, but said Williams was out of pocket nonetheless. “I didn’t agree with what she said. She was reaching a little bit, but she’s hurt and she’s still hurting. It’s just a process that she has to deal with.”
Over the years, Williams has repeatedly mocked Britney Spears, but in a twist that was so out of left field it was comedic, she recently declared “death to them all!” in reference to Spears’s conservators. The clip has since been scrubbed from her YouTube channel but lives on in TikTok audios.
Williams’s most recent and arguably worst offense was a takedown of 19-year-old TikTok user Matima Miller, known to fans as Swavy. Williams delivered the news of Miller’s murder by comparing her follower count to his and proclaiming that she had “no idea who this person is, and neither does one person in this building.” It was a stomach-turning, senseless blow to his family, who are not famous by any means. The list of controversies goes on and on.
Despite Williams’s often crude commentary, advertisers don’t seem dissuaded (Chevrolet once dropped her for complaining about historically Black colleges and universities, but that’s about it), and viewers still tune in. She is simply a natural at being on television. She glides from segment to segment as if she is just catching up with her viewers — did you hear so-and-so did this? What do you all think about this, that, and the other that what’s-his-name was caught doing last week?
Even if fans don’t always approve of her approach, they wholly believe in her right to have a platform, regardless of who it bothers. They may be frustrated by her, but they also feel a kinship, even a kind of ownership, over her.
“She just wouldn’t be who she was today without stepping on some people’s toes and hurting some people’s feelings,” Nerestant said.
The internet loves Wendy Williams … kind of
Wendy Williams, the person, isn’t very online. On Instagram, she merely posts recaps of her show, blurry photos of her meals (her commenters don’t hesitate to tell her when the food looks gross), and the occasional selfie. The account itself isn’t strictly business or personal, but it mostly operates as a promotional account for the show itself.
Even if Wendy Williams isn’t really on the internet, in some ways she embodies its attitudes. Conversations about celebrities are always rude and outlandish online, with or without Wendy on the air. It is so easy to dogpile on Williams — a person who has said some awful things and has the nerve not to cower afterward, even though she is in the spotlight herself. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine back in 2019, Williams was asked why people are interested in celebrity gossip. Her response was simple: “Celebrity lives are something that people can live vicariously through,” she said. “It takes people’s minds off their own troubles. Everybody has troubles.”
Williams gets paid to be judgmental, which is what a lot of people spend all day doing for free. Online, we’re all talk show hosts who can fire off a hot take tweet, go on a live rant, or create a slideshow of opinions theorizing on a celebrity romance. In fact, many online comment sections, threads, and forums use Williams as a tool — between user clapbacks and questions, her image dances, stares, and grimaces in GIF form through it all. Her relevance continues because Williams’s image has arguably become bigger and more significant than her actual show — maybe even bigger than Williams herself.
As one TikTok user put it, she comes off as “a caricature of a woman.” Her baritone “How you doin’?” catchphrase is instantly recognizable. There’s the unfortunate clip of her fainting on-air while dressed as the Statue of Liberty for a Halloween episode. There’s an endless arsenal of pouty, shocked-looking photos of her, and internet users gravitate toward them as reaction GIFs and pics. There are countless edits of her body, warped to make her appear bug-eyed like an alien or contorted to make her torso as thin as a rail. Her being is primed for virality because there are so few famous people who are as theatrical or as unnerving.
Her television audience is a loyal bunch, but her internet audience is much less kind. They see her as sort of a joke of a figure. Her memeification both proves and reinforces her popularity, but her meme status is complicated — there is real adoration and endearment there, but it’s also mixed in with casual, unfamiliar “fanship” which sees her as less of a three- dimensional person and more of, for lack of a better term, a human emoji.
On a sociological level, it’s fascinating and revealing, but it’s also somewhat dangerous when one considers the social implications of making a Black woman so separate from personhood. As Bea Forman wrote for The Goods, the online adoption of memes and slang from Black people is “committed so casually and frequently that it feels like the default mode of shitposting.”
It’s no fault of her own, but Williams’s image has often been used as an instrument in that appropriation as the internet forges a world built in the likeness of Blackness. Her prevalence on Black and gay Twitter has parlayed her into wider consciousness, as such things go. In the public imagination, she is not a person but an idea. She is camp. She is, as she once said of Lil’ Kim, “an icon, a legend, and she is the moment.”
David Livingston/Getty Images
Wendy Williams with her recently awarded star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The fact of the matter is that being disrespectful about a dead teen isn’t enough to take Wendy off the air. For 13 years, Williams has clocked into her show daily, guns ablazing. The public might be growing more vocal in its criticisms, but even amid health concerns, she has kept her seat onstage.
Still, her onscreen future now feels in flux. Williams has only taken a few brief hiatuses before — due to Covid-19 production stops, to deal with health issues from her Graves’ disease and lymphedema, and to mourn the death of her mother.
That’s why it was so unusual when the new season of Wendy was postponed.
“I hope it helps to put things in perspective,” Turner said of Williams’s current health issues. “But there is a place for what she does. She is loved by pop culture.”
Despite her illness, she was seen by the paparazzi vaping in a car in New York City in September, and tabloid rumors are circulating that she may have fallen out of sobriety. In 2019, after discovering that her ex-husband was having a child with his girlfriend, she checked into a sober living home to prevent herself from relapsing. Additionally, she was recently admitted to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. Her brother has stated that this time may be particularly difficult for her, due to the anniversary of their mother’s death approaching as well.
It’s difficult to parse, and perhaps unfair to speculate, whether Williams is on her way off the air after a rough beginning to her latest season. It almost seems like nothing will stop The Wendy Williams Show until she decides to end it. Until then, it’s hard to completely hate the player. As long as there’s a market for casual chaos, Williams will have a niche to fill. We can moralize and debate about whether her work serves our society, but as with so much of television, it just serves to entertain — and Wendy does the job with more flair than most would dare to muster.
From The Hindu: Sports
T20 World Cup first round | Berrington’s 70 takes Scotland to 165-9 against PNG - PNG did put the brakes on scoring as they conceded only 19 runs in the final three overs, taking six wickets in the process.
Juiced and Air Power show out - Juiced and Air Power showed out when the horses were exercised here on Tuesday (Oct. 19) morning.Sand track:600m: Divine Soul (Ayyar) 40. Easy. Tough
Coronavirus | Prospect of no jab, no visa for Australian Open tennis players - Victoria State Premier Daniel Andrews has already introduced a vaccine mandate for professional athletes competing in domestic sports leagues and people working in some industries including health
Harbhajan Singh, Javagal Srinath awarded MCC life membership - India’s Harbhajan Singh and Javagal Srinath were on Tuesday among 18 cricketers who where awarded life membership of Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC).Th
T20 World Cup warm-up | India looks to fix batting order against Australia - Ravindra Jadeja, Shardul Thakur and mystery spinner Varun Chakravarthy are expected to get a look in
From The Hindu: National News
Migrant workers fleeing Kashmir throng railway stations, bus stands in Jammu and Udhampur - Selective killings have triggered a fear psychosis among the workers
Jaishankar visits Israel’s Ovda Airbase to meet IAF contingent taking part in Blue Flag exercise - A total of 84 Indian Air Force (IAF) personnel are taking part in the exercises along with five upgraded Mirage 2000 fighter aircraft
Congress to give 40% of tickets to women in Uttar Pradesh assembly polls, says Priyanka Gandhi - “We want women in politics to become full-fledged partners in power,” she said
Tahsildars cannot cancel community certificates: HC - Only a scrutiny committee can cancel if the certificate was obtained fraudulently
BSF issue yet another jolt to Punjab: Minister - State ignored while granting special package of incentives for capital investment subsidy, he says
From BBC: Europe
Polish PM accuses EU of blackmail as row over rule of law escalates - Mateusz Morawiecki clashes with EU leaders over a Polish court ruling that rejected parts of EU law.
Male State: Russia bans group for anti-women and anti-gay posts - Russia bans a group called Male State which hounded women and gay people online.
Norway attack: Victims killed with ‘sharp object’ not bow and arrow - Victims of last week’s attack were killed by a “sharp object” rather than a bow and arrow, police say.
Peter R de Vries: Suspect denies knowledge of Dutch reporter’s murder - The suspect appears in court alongside a man accused of shooting Peter R de Vries in Amsterdam.
Russia to suspend Nato diplomatic mission amid tension - Nato expelled eight Russian diplomats earlier this month, saying they were intelligence officers.
From Ars Technica
Myth, busted: Spider silk might not have antibiotic properties after all - Scientists extracted dragline silk from some spiders using a mechanical Lego apparatus. - link
With no new Apple monitors, here are the best high-res screens for your Mac - Get a monitor with the resolution and ports you need. - link
Valve’s “Deck Verified” program evaluates which Steam games are Steam Deck-ready - “Verified” games need to work with Steam Deck controls, have legible text, and more. - link
Starts at $1,999, ends at $6,099: Here’s what the new MacBook Pros will cost you - Switching to Apple’s own chips hasn’t simplified the MacBook Pro’s config options. - link
Disinformation guru “Hacker X” names his employer: NaturalNews.com - Rob Willis now says no to a “half-assed whistleblow.” - link
From Jokes Subreddit
The maid told her mistress :“I think I deserve a raise” -
Mistress : Give me reasons why you need a raise?"
Maid “I cook better than you”
Mistress :" Who told that?"
Maid " Your husband did."
Mistress “Hmmm”
Maid “I clean the house better than you”
Mistress :" Who told that?"
Maid " Your husband did."
Mistress “Ok..”
Maid “I fuck better than you”
Mistress :" Did my husband tell that too? "
Maid " No,but your driver did."
Mistress “How much raise are you talking about?”
Edit : This joke was translated and its common to use the word ‘mistress’ as a female form of master in many countries,not the implied meaning of concubine
A horny gorilla sees a lion bent over a small stream, taking a drink. -
The gorilla runs up behind the lion, grabs on, and has his way with him. The gorilla then takes off running, with the very angry lion on his heels. As they run through the jungle, the gorilla gets a bit of a lead, and sees a British safari camp ahead.
The gorilla enters the camp, grabs some khakis that are hung out to dry, and puts on pants, a shirt, and a hat. He sits on a chair by the campfire and grabs a copy of the local paper, pretending to read, to hide his face.
The lion enters the campsite and lets out a huge roar. He yells, “did anyone see a gorilla run through here?”
The gorilla, in full disguise, calls out, “you mean the one that fucked the lion up the ass?”
The lion exclaims, “oh my god! It’s in the paper already?”
An Englishman and an Irishman go to a bakery. The Englishman steals three buns and puts them into his pockets and leaves. He says to the Irishman: “That took great skill and guile to steal those buns. The owner didn’t even see me.” -
“That’s just simple thievery,” the Irishman replied. “I’ll show you how to do it the honest way and get the same results.”
The Irishman then proceeded to call out the owner of the bakery and says: “Sir, I want to show you a magic trick.” The owner was intrigued so he came over to see the magic trick.
The Irishman asked him for a bun and then he proceeded to eat it. He asked two more times and after eating them again the owner says: “Okay my friend, where’s the magic trick?”
The Irishman then said: “Look in the Englishman’s pockets.”
A son asked his father where poo came from. The father was a little uncomfortable but gave the son an honest explanation. With a perplexed look on the son’s face he stared at the father for a while and then asked- -
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David Livingston/Getty Images