Britney Spears laid out another lengthy Instagram post Monday addressing why she’s no longer doing music.
The singer said she’s not making or performing new music because of the “awful things” that were done to her.
“So much wasted time to only embarrass me and humiliate me and I guess it seems odd to most now why I don’t even do music anymore,” she wrote.
She added that after what she’s been through, she’s “scared of people and the business.”
“They really hurt me!!!!!!” she said. “Not doing music anymore is my way of saying ‘F*** you’ in a sense when it only actually benefits my family by ignoring my real work.”
Britney also addressed one of her since-deleted posts from last week, in which she listed some of her accomplishments and promised to be her “own cheerleader.” She admitted to having “serious insecurities” and felt she may have come across as an “obnoxious 8 year old” by rattling off her career milestones, but she explained why she did it.
“Honestly my family embarrassed me and hurt me deeply… so tooting my own horn and seeing my past accomplishments reflecting back at me actually helped!!!!” she wrote.
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Jared Leto has shared a tribute to his late Dallas Buyers Club director Jean-Marc Vallée.
In a tweet alongside a photo of him alongside Vallée, the Thirty Seconds to Mars frontman wrote, “A filmmaking force and a true artist who changed my life with a beautiful movie called Dallas Buyers Club.”
“Much love to everyone who knew him,” Leto added. “Life is precious.”
The photo shows Leto holding the Golden Globe he won for his role in Dallas Buyers Club. His performance also earned him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
Vallée died unexpectedly over the weekend at age 58, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Along with Dallas Buyers Club, Vallée directed films including Wild and The Young Victoria, as well as the TV series Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects.
A filmmaking force and a true artist who changed my life with a beautiful movie called Dallas Buyers Club. Much love to everyone who knew him. Life is precious. pic.twitter.com/2DT0tu9Lbo
Miranda Lambert is continuing to demonstrate her LGBTQIA+ allyship by contributing a song to the new season of Queer Eye.
As an end-of-year gift for fans, Miranda has revealed that she’s written and recorded the song “Y’all Means All” for the show’s upcoming season, set for release on New Years Eve.
Filmed in the country superstar’s home state of Texas, season six of Queer Eye follows Jonathan Van Ness, Tan France, Karamo Brown, Antoni Porowski and Bobby Berk as they provide fashion and lifestyle makeovers to a person who is transitioning, a honky tonk owner, a group of high school seniors attending prom and more.
The latest trailer features a clip of Miranda’s inclusivity-themed track, in which she sings, “If your life is like a tornado/All you need is a smoke and a rainbow” before chanting “y’all means all.”
“Here’s one last surprise for y’all this year! A new song “Y’all Means All” will be out on 12/31 to celebrate the new season of @QueerEye that filmed all in Texas!” the hit singer writes on Twitter.
“OMG We partnered with THE country music queen @mirandalambert for her new song Y’all Means All debuting alongside S6 on 12/31,” the Queer Eye account shares.
Earlier this year, Miranda released a video for the remix of “Tequila Does” featuring her brother, Luke, and his husband, Marc. She has also attended Pride parades with the couple.
Michael Bublé may be Mr. Christmas, but this year, he’s fine with saying goodbye to the holiday season, because he’s got something new coming down the pike.
Michael has posted a Claymation video on his socials that shows him walking up to a turntable that’s playing his version of “Jingle Bells,” taking the record off and throwing it away. He then replaces it with a new record, which we’ll get to hear on January 14, 2022. From the snippet that plays, it seems to be a song called “I’ll Never Not Love You.”
Michael’s new album is due in 2022 and he’s already said he feels as though it’s the best one he’s ever done. As previously reported, he’ll celebrate the new album with a limited engagement at Resorts World in Las Vegas that runs from April 27 to May 7.
Nonpoint has premiered the video “Back in the Game,” a track off the band’s new EP, Ruthless.
The clip, streaming now on YouTube, captures footage from Elias Soriano and company’s recent run of live shows, and showcases the group’s dedicated fanbase.
“This song sums up our view on how we approached independence from the very beginning,” Soriano says. “We will be small but mighty.”
“Like the song says, ‘I may be one man, but I’m a death squad,'” he adds. “We give everything we got with ultimate absolution.”
Ruthless is out now. The five-track collection also includes the previously released single “Ruthless” and a cover of Prince’s “When Doves Cry.”
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Another Broadway show bites the dust due to COVID-19.
The Temptations musical Ain’t Too Proud announced it will be closing for good next month, after the latest pandemic surge forced the show to cancel performances.
“Come groove with us one last time on Broadway!” the show tweeted Tuesday. “The Tony-winning Ain’t Too Proud will play its final performance on Broadway January 16, 2022. Don’t miss your chance to see us in our final three weeks.”
Ain’t Too Proud has not run since December 15, but hopes to resume shows tonight.
Jagged Little Pill, Waitress and the play Thoughts of a Colored Man all announced last week that they were closing amid rising COVID-19 cases.
Come groove with us one last time on Broadway! The Tony-winning Ain’t Too Proud will play its final performance on Broadway January 16, 2022. Don’t miss your chance to see us in our final three weeks: https://t.co/FJkMMNEe7rpic.twitter.com/etkZIrbGaS
Bebe Rexha is a champion of body positivity, but even she has days where she doesn’t feel her best.
In an emotional TikTok video posted Monday, captioned “Honest update,” the singer admits she’s struggling to feel comfortable in her own body.
“So it is the holidays and I know we’re all supposed to be, like, merry and like, ‘Yay, it’s the holidays,’ which I am … ish,”she says. “I think I am the heaviest I have ever been. I weighed myself just now and I don’t feel comfortable sharing the weight ’cause I feel embarrassed.”
“I just feel disgusting, you know, like in my own body,” she adds, tearing up.
Bebe explains that’s the reason why she hasn’t posted much to social media over the past year. She acknowledged that she’s struggling with how to help herself and love herself, sparking a ton of supportive and understanding comments from fans.
Back in June, Bebe posted a viral TikTok video of herself in lingerie, asking viewers to “normalize” weighing 165 pounds. And earlier this month, she posted a video in front of the Christmas tree wearing a red bra and captioning it “Who said curvy girls can’t wear lingerie?”
(WASHINGTON) — For half a century, American women have had the right to choose to end a pregnancy at any point before a fetus is viable outside the womb. If 2021 saw that freedom start to crumble, 2022 could see it more widely wiped away.
“I think this is the time,” said an anti-abortion rights activist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who declined to share her name this fall while outside the state’s only remaining abortion clinic in Jackson.
Mississippi, which has asked the Supreme Court to end constitutional protection for abortion, appears likely to at least win affirmation of its 15-week ban on the procedure — more than two months earlier than the current standard allows.
Texas, which now forbids abortions after six weeks, has become the first state to effectively eliminate most procedures statewide since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. SB8, which has been in effect for nearly four months, has defied repeated legal challenges with its novel enforcement mechanism that pits citizen against citizen.
Other Republican-led states are racing to follow suit. A record number of states have enacted more than 100 stringent new restrictions on abortion access in the last year alone, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research organization.
In the months ahead, the nation’s highest court could give states a green light to go even further, potentially scrapping the viability line for abortion bans and shredding decades of precedent.
“The Supreme Court is in dialogue with social movements, with political institutions, with health care providers, and that’s what brought us to this moment,” said Florida State University Law professor Mary Ziegler, a leading abortion law historian.
The moment is especially pivotal for social conservatives who have spent decades laying legal and political groundwork to roll back abortion access despite broad public support for Roe.
“Could the days of the Court’s ‘abortion distortion’ jurisprudence finally be behind us? I’m optimistic,” said Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative legal advocacy group that has advocated for the reversal of Roe.
A dozen states have so-called trigger laws set to ban all or nearly all abortions the moment the Supreme Court delivers a favorable decision. Ten more have similar laws that could quickly follow suit.
The anti-abortion movement is “well-organized, well-funded, and they stick together,” said Derenda Hancock, co-founder of the Pink House Defenders, a volunteer patient escort group at Jackson Women’s Health in Mississippi. “In the meantime, the pro-choice movement has a lot of inner fighting, inner stress.”
To counter the momentum, abortion providers and women’s health advocates have been scrambling to advance new initiatives.
Whole Woman’s Health, a leading abortion care provider in Texas, is now providing the procedure for free before six weeks of pregnancy, in accordance with state law.
The Biden administration announced this month that the abortion pill mifepristone can now be distributed by mail or at commercial pharmacies if authorized by a physician, rather than in-person at a hospital, clinic or medical office.
It “did not come a moment too soon,” ACLU attorney Julia Kaye said.
But the moves to shore up abortion access so far only have a limited impact.
Nineteen states have laws banning distribution of mifepristone by mail: 13 are in the South, and six in the Midwest, according to Guttmacher.
Only 15 states and the District of Columbia have laws that protect the right to abortion.
The House of Representatives for the first time passed a bill to protect abortion rights, but it faces long odds in a narrowly divided Senate.
If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, the battle over abortion rights in 2022 would shift to state legislatures, legal analysts said.
“At least in the short term, this would mean it would be a state-by-state issue, and even more than is already the case,” Ziegler said. “Your ability to get an abortion would depend on where you live.”
There would likely be renewed attempts to enshrine abortion protections into either state law or state constitutions, as well as emboldened efforts by abortion opponents to legislate rights for a fetus.
“I think that the end game for many opponents of abortion is actually enshrining in the law a constitutional protection for the fetus,” said Cardozo Law professor and ABC News Supreme Court contributor Kate Shaw.
The Supreme Court is expected to deliver its decision in June, just months before the midterm elections.
“The trend around the globe is toward liberalization of abortion,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said. “If the U.S. takes this step back, we’re just going to have to go forward.”
(NEW YORK) — A new trend on TikTok could lead some teens to believe they have a serious mental disorder, according to some experts.
The app, which has become a community for users to connect and for teens to show off dance moves and share other fun videos, has recently had some trending videos of young people claiming to have a borderline personality, bipolar or dissociative identity disorder, which is spreading like wildfire on the platform.
Posts with the hashtags, “dissociative identity disorder” and “borderline personality disorder” have been viewed hundreds of millions of times. And some of those videos list possible signs to look out for and encourage viewers to self-evaluate.
Samantha Fridley, 18, said these videos influenced her to believe that she was suffering from a mental disorder.
“I remember seeing these videos on my ‘For You’ page of people saying, like, ‘These are signs that you have this disorder,’ bipolar or borderline and all these other weird disorders that I’ve never even heard of before,” Fridley told GMA. “My mind would be like, ‘Maybe I don’t have just depression and anxiety, maybe I have something else.'”
“After working with a therapist for a long time, I started realizing that I don’t have borderline personality, I don’t have disassociated identity, I don’t have bipolar. I just have what I’ve always had, which is depression and anxiety,” she added.
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, borderline personality disorder is extremely rare — only 1.4% of the U.S. adult population is estimated to have this condition and it is rarely diagnosed in adolescents.
Mental health professionals say these videos may pose an alarming risk to a potentially vulnerable population.
“If you spend 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes viewing people talk about these disorders over and over again, that can make it seem like these conditions are a lot more prevalent than they actually are in the world,” said psychologist Ethan Kross, the author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.
To help teens on TikTok, experts are urging parents to maintain an open line of communication with their kids about mental health.
“Take the time to empathetically hear them out,” Kross said. “How intense are these symptoms? How long are they lasting? Does it seem like they’re interfering with your child’s ability to live the life that they want to live? Again, if the answer to those questions is yes, that’s a cue to then take the next steps to get a formal diagnosis.”
In a statement to ABC News, TikTok said, “We care deeply about the well-being of our community, which is why we continue to invest in digital literacy education aimed at helping people evaluate and understand content they engage with online. We strongly encourage individuals to seek professional medical advice if they are in need of support.”
