When journalist Kate Doak’s tweet came through on Saturday morning, criticising the decision of The Sydney Morning Herald to “out” Rebel Wilson’s new partner as a woman, I couldn’t make sense of the story.
It’s 2022 for heaven’s sake! Who cares who Wilson – or any celebrity – chooses to love or date? And then to have the temerity, as gossip columnist Andrew Hornery did, to complain about being gazumped when Wilson decided to do the honours herself. Baffling.
Is the media ever justified in outing a public person’s private life? In my view, in just one situation. When the public figure — celebrity or politician — is living a life that contradicts their public actions or proclamations. If any anti-gay politician is snapped in a gay bar, that’s in the public interest. Ditto if a celebrity who uses her influence to oppose abortion is discovered to have had one.
Wilson is not guilty of such hypocrisies, which means there was no justification for the SMH to publicise her private life.
Of course, this is what celebrity gossip columnists do, publicise the private lives of public figures. Not because it’s in the public interest, but because the public is interested. Indeed, that’s how the SMH justified its decision. By suggesting that Wilson was getting the same paparazzi treatment as any other celebrity, which in this day and age was justified because in 2022 “love is love”.
Yet at the same time, the paper acknowledged that gay relationships are different. Which was why from an “abundance of caution and respect” it gave Wilson two days to comment.
Which is where I call bullshit. If Andrew Hornery and his editor Bevan Shields were really concerned that exposing Wilson’s relationship was “outing her”, how did the two-day comment period throw her a lifeline? All it did was give her the one option she eventually took — to out herself, a decision for which Hornery castigated her in the piece that has now been taken down and for which Hornery has apologised and said he has learnt lessons from.
As gay ABC Radio National broadcaster Patricia Karvelas put it: “I don’t believe in outing … [because] it’s dangerous.”
It’s dangerous because whether you’re outing someone for being gay, having premarital sex or dating someone of a different religion, you’re exposing something about a private life that they’d chosen to keep hidden. And while the risks this brings may not apply to most of us, that doesn’t mean they aren’t real for that person.
Risks related to churchgoing relatives, children in less-than-progressive schools or old-world relatives who believe in honour killings. Risks that, should they fall on the downside, will redound solely to the detriment of that person’s life, which is why decisions about if and when to take them belong solely to that person.
And are none of our damn business.
