Outpouring of support for Rylan Clark proves that compassion trumps cruelty

On Sunday, a video emerged of media personality Rylan Clark on a night out in London’s West End. He’s heard saying, “Gimme the f**kin’ gear and we’ll go.” When he sees that he is being filmed he says, clearly jokingly, “delete that now or I’ll f**kin kill you”.

The video was leaked and framed by a Sunday newspaper as Rylan “demanding” cocaine, though there is no suggestion that Rylan was being serious. The absolutely overwhelming response from Twitter was: who cares?

While the tabloid press reports on a celebrity having a night out, hypocrisy, corruption and cowardice ooze from the walls of Downing Street. Besides, the public can no longer be goaded by performative outrage over a celebrity potentially taking drugs, only months after cocaine was found all over parliament.

Shortly afterwards, Rylan tweeted: “Morning. Slow news day. Have a good Sunday.” Cue an avalanche of love and support. People immediately jumped to his defence. This was an unnecessary invasion of privacy; a non-story. Yes, drugs are illegal but what Rylan does on a night out is not, I would argue, in the public interest.

The outpouring of compassion that followed the leak filled me with relief. In a rare moment of unity on Twitter, everybody got behind one of the UK’s great entertainers. Nobody believed that this story should damage Rylan; they only wanted to ensure he felt supported. I’d like more of this, please, until we squash the demand for potentially damaging exposes, which don’t serve the public interest, once and for all.

Scandal sells. We like to talk about each other, and we especially like talking about celebrities. Growing up in the Noughties, I saw celebrities’ private lives splashed across women’s weeklies and national papers. I learnt from an early age that we are encouraged to speculate about people we don’t know, to project our own skewed perception of our morality onto these people. There was the sense that they weren’t human beings, not like you and I, anyway.

Then, Britney Spears was pictured smashing a car window, and shaving her head. At school and on social media, her very public crisis became a running joke for years to come: “I am this close to shaving my head.” Sure, you’re having a bad time but is it “2007 Britney” bad? This was never OK, but given what we know now about her conservatorship, the flippancy with which we responded to her crisis makes me queasy.

A few years later, Amy Winehouse died. The tragedy of it slammed into me, but I was still too young to fully grasp the insidious way the media had chronicled her spiral. Society has so far held a morbid curiosity for watching famous people unravel. Are we slowly witnessing this fall out of favour?

Social media trolling brought this tabloid gossip into the digital age. Sometimes, I think the tides are turning on this. The public, once so hungry for a public breakdown, are still reeling from the tragic death of TV presenter Caroline Flack. But this “be kind” sentiment largely depends on who is currently in the spotlight, and what they are deemed guilty of. This needs to change.

The reaction to this leak, while so heartening, would likely have been different if Rylan wasn’t so well-loved. Reality stars and media personalities are always teetering on the brink of becoming villains in the eyes of viewers, who watch the carefully curated and edited snapshot of their lives.

We see this play out in Love Island. In 2018, former contestant Sophie Gradon took her own life. Speaker after her death, her mum Deborah Gradon said her daughter was never the same after appearing on the show. Before he died by suicide, former contestant Mike Thalassitis admitted he found his “Muggy Mike” nickname cringy and hated being painted as the cartoon villain.

A year later, Caroline Flack also took her own life. She had been relentlessly hounded on social media and in the press. The tragedies laid bare the consequences of the social media pile on, and of tabloids treating people’s darkest moments as entertainment.

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It would be foolhardy, however, to think the cycle has been fully broken. In the 2021 series of Love Island, contestant Chloe Burrows was receiving death threats. I still regularly stumble upon Tweets along the lines of “I don’t know why, but I just can’t stand X.”

This story isn’t just about Rylan. It’s about what kind of society we want to be, and what we think we have the right to know. The social media response was heartening (Rylan has since tweeted his thanks for all the kindness), and shows that it can be a compassionate place. Its evidence that we can be forgiving of people’s mistakes.

The tabloid press should learn that there is little public appetite for a frenzied feast on celebrity behaviour, but we won’t make lasting systemic change until people stop clicking, engaging and buying. Maybe the reaction to this “story” about Rylan shows the change has already begun.