The internet has revoked Zöe Kravitz of her It Girl status after she called out Will Smith‘s behaviour towards Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards (AKA the Oscars).
ICYMI, Smith slapped Rock at the Oscars because the latter comedian made a “G.I. Jane” joke about Smith’s wife Jaida Pinkett-Smith‘s baldness. Pinkett-Smith suffers from alopecia but Rock reportedly did not know that when he made the joke.
Kravitz criticised Smith for turning to violence on the night in two Insta posts on Wednesday about what she wore at the Oscars.
“Here’s a picture of my dress at the award show where we are apparently assaulting people on stage now,” she said.
A fan asked in the comments whether her caption meant she didn’t support Smith for “defending his wife”. According to ELLE she succinctly replied: “Nope”.
View this post on Instagram
Kravitz then copped heat for criticising Smith and deleted the comments on both posts.
But people on Twitter caught wind of her comments and turned on her. They brought up Kravitz’s own “problematic” past.
https://twitter.com/drakeydrake123/status/1508927162245648385
They circulated an interview Kravitz did in 2013 where she made some uncomfortably sexualised remarks about Will Smith’s then-14-year-old son Jaden Smith. The Batman actress was 24 at the time.
“There were moments that I was hanging out with Jaden and thinking, ‘I can’t believe you’re 14’. I have to check myself like what I sat to you,” she said in the interview via JustJared.
“He has so much personality and so much swag, he is so much cooler than I am. And he’s so handsome. I was always like, ‘when you’re older, you know, we’ll hangout… Nope, that’s inappropriate, you’re 14.’
Folks also brought up the fact Kravitz was close friends with fashion designer Alexander Wang. Wang has been accused by several people of sexual harassment and assault.
He has denied the allegations against him. But he said in an Instagram statement he regretted causing his alleged victims pain.
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Fans argued Kravitz’s friendship with Wang made her recent comments about Smith hypocritical. Terms such as “Zöe Kravitz predator” and “Zöe Kravitz receipts” started trending on Twitter. People were claiming that the actress was no longer the It Girl.
https://twitter.com/Lamiasdottir/status/1508921028474552325
https://twitter.com/ayicat/status/1508941848714297348
im glad zoe kravitz said that now we can just focus on zendaya
— . (@clitereIIa) March 29, 2022
cannot believe y’all were just sitting on all of these zoe kravitz receipts pic.twitter.com/Nv4ZezSfeJ
— rae ⚔️ (@raehasasword) March 30, 2022
I have never seen someone go from the darling of the internet to dragged back and forth like a ragdoll and tossed into the fire like as quickly as zoe kravitz. y’all really ethered her into the dust. pic.twitter.com/DDQPEkS7Pi
— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) March 30, 2022
https://twitter.com/trinitykelia/status/1508923102796734471
But Kravitz isn’t the first celebrity this week to have a “hot take” about the slap. Celebrities such as Jim Carrey, Judd Apatow and Kathy Griffin all criticised the incident.
But it feels like only Kravitz has had her online reputation nuked in just 24 hours. That could be because she was so beloved before this and had a lot to lose. But I think it is also very telling of the way we hold people accountable online.
I’m not justifying her previous comments about Jaden, which were undoubtedly super inappropriate. There’s also a clear double standard in her calling out an assault but associating with someone who’s been accused of similar offences.
Her comments about Jaden Smith were in the public domain. You can Google them and find them very easily. The same goes for her relationship with Wang. But it all resurfaced and became a story because of Twitter’s outcry at her stance on The Slap.
zoe kravitz being weird as hell and we’d genuinely have no idea if it wasn’t for that instagram post??
— ceo of kory (@korysverse) March 29, 2022
The impact her honestly minimal comments on Monday have had on her career shows how immediately we turn on people (whether justified or not).
The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino said in her book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion we live in an age of competitive wokeness. We’re constantly trying to one-up each other to see who is more politically correct. And we weaponise things others say in their past against us when we’re in an argument.
Nothing has felt more app of that description than the way the internet has reacted to the Will Smith slap and the hot takes about it.
