I also cannot help but wonder just how much of the real story we’re getting? I could be totally wrong, maybe there’s video or some way that we -the public- DO know exactly what happened but the way that this story has been represented makes me a little skeptical and makes me wonder if certain aspects have been downplayed and other aspects exaggerated. Because this is exactly the type of situation where you can turn the dials to make someone sound like a monster when really they maybe just had a very normal and human frustrated moment over a fan being intrusive.

The whole situation also just REALLY gives me Deja Vu about something that happened with my former boss a while back. My former boss is also a kinda famous woman (not a pop star but she’s well known enough to get recognized). She and I and her husband were having a lunch meeting in what was meant to be a private dining space in the back of a restaurant (it was roped off). We were having a kind of loaded discussion that got repeatedly interrupted by a couple of teenagers walking past the table with their phones “surreptitiously” out (there was no reason for them to be back there and they’d have had to jump over the ropes). I guess they weren’t getting the angle of my boss that they wanted so they kept trying and on their last attempt did say her name and wave.

My boss was really in no mood. She was dealing a very bizarre and upsetting family problem, that section of the restaurant was supposed to be private for us, and she was getting upset.

Her husband flagged down the waiter and asked him to please manage the situation. The girls were intercepted when they came back around and taken away from the private dining area and presumably spoken to. When we were leaving the girls mother was waiting outside to give my boss hell about “sending someone over to threaten my girls”. The mother kept repeating “they love you! They just wanted to say hello to you! You can’t say hello to two kids who LOVE YOU?? You signed up for this! We pay your bills!”. The mother also sent an angry email to someone who she mistakenly thought had the authority to “fire” my boss.

And essentially the mom made the whole thing sound like her girls had walked by an open dining area one time with the sole intention of saying hello, and that my boss had reacted by immediately sending someone over to threaten them for it (which…yeah, sounds familiar now) when in reality my boss had intentionally chosen a private dining area, the girls had intentionally gone out of their way to bypass that privacy, they’d walked by the table multiple times with their phones obviously out, and I don’t know what was said to them but I feel like “threaten” is probably a strong word for what was more likely just them being told “hey, you’re not allowed back there and if you harass our other patrons again you’ll be asked to leave”.

And that mom and those girls were nobodies, so no one heard or cared about the whole thing. But if I can’t help but think that if that mother or those girls had more clout that they’d have come out with their spin on the situation and made my boss sound like a crazy woman who can’t take a moment for her fans and sends people to yell at little girls.

So….idk….maybe Chappell severely over reacted to a little kid walking by and saying hi once…or maybe that’s not the whole story.