26 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
In modern fandom, an attack against a celebrity is an attack against the fans.
DEPT. OF POPULAR CULTURE
THE FORCE IS WITH THEM
Fans are more powerful than ever. Does their passion have a dark side?
BY MICHAEL SCHULMAN
ILLUSTRATION BY LAURA BREILING
O
n June 29, 2018, Wanna Thomp-
son, a freelance music journalist,
was in an Uber with her boyfriend,
headed into downtown Toronto to watch
a podcast taping. Thompson had spent
part of the day listening to new music
by Nicki Minaj, including a typically
braggadocious track called “Barbie
Tingz.” (“I’m still fly, just bagged a white
guy,/ Ritchie-like guy and I still eat
Thai.”) Thompson, who was twenty-six,
could recite most of Minaj’s lyrics by
heart. Minaj, like Thompson’s mother,
is from Trinidad, and Thompson admired
her as one of the few female rappers to
become mega-famous. “I was a hundred
per cent a fan,” she told me recently.
But, listening to the new stuff,
Thompson worried that Minaj’s musi-
cal progression had stalled. From the
car, she tweeted to her fourteen thou-
sand followers, “You know how dope it
would be if Nicki put out mature con-
tent? No silly shit. Just reflecting on
past relationships, being a boss, hard-
ships, etc. She’s touching 40 soon, a new
direction is needed.” When Thompson
got to the show, she put her phone away.
By the time she checked it again, two
hours later, her tweet had gone viral. “I
had, like, hundreds of superfans just
trashing me,” Thompson recalled. She
was receiving so many direct messages—
some telling her to kill herself, some
accusing her of not being a “true fan”—
that her phone kept crashing. And there
was a message from Minaj’s official ac-
count. It read, “Eat a dick u hating ass
hoe. Got the nerve to have a trini flag
on ur page.” The message added, “Just
say u jealous I’m rich, famous intelli-
gent, pretty and go! But wait! Leave my
balls! Tired of u sucking them.”
Thompson, convinced that the mes-
sage was fake, showed it to her boy-
friend. “I was stunned,” she said. She
responded with some lines from Maya
Angelou: “You may kill me with your
hatefulness/ But still, like air, I rise.”
Minaj later denied sending the mes-
sages, but, on her own Twitter account,
which had twenty-one million follow-
ers, she posted a list of songs that pre-
sumably proved her maturity, includ-
ing “Pills N Potions.” Thompson set
her Twitter account to private, but, at
around 10 p.m., her phone began light-
ing up with angry text messages; some-
one had circumvented the lax security
measures on her Web site and leaked
her number. She changed all her pass-
words and frantically scrubbed her old
tweets of any mention of her day job,
in human resources, or her middle name,
which she used at work.
At the time, Thompson was an un-
paid intern for a hip-hop blog run by
the marketing strategist Karen Civil.
Within hours, the site manager e-mailed
Thompson to tell her that her intern-
ship had been terminated. The com-
pany said that she had violated a non-
disclosure agreement and that Minaj
was one of Civil’s clients. (Thompson
says that she didn’t know this and has
denied violating the N.D.A. Civil told
me that Thompson had seen her client
list and that the site didn’t allow “hot
takes.”) The next day, Thompson posted
screenshots of the messages from Mi-
naj’s account, but this only inflamed the
rapper’s fans. One harasser lifted an In-
stagram photo of Thompson’s daugh-
ter, who was four years old, and photo-
shopped her face onto a gorilla’s body.
Like most music idols, Minaj has a
hardcore fan base with a collective name,
the Barbz; Beyoncé has the Beyhive,
Justin Bieber the Beliebers, and Lady
Gaga the Little Monsters. The most
fervent among them are called “stans.”
The term derives from a 2000 track by
Eminem, in which he raps about a fic-
