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Lawsuit by Former Dancers Accuses Lizzo of Harassment, Creating Hostile Work Environment

US singer Lizzo performs during the second day of the Nos Alive Festival in Oeiras, Portugal, 07 July 2023. The festival runs until 08 July 2023. (EPA)
US singer Lizzo performs during the second day of the Nos Alive Festival in Oeiras, Portugal, 07 July 2023. The festival runs until 08 July 2023. (EPA)
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Lawsuit by Former Dancers Accuses Lizzo of Harassment, Creating Hostile Work Environment

US singer Lizzo performs during the second day of the Nos Alive Festival in Oeiras, Portugal, 07 July 2023. The festival runs until 08 July 2023. (EPA)
US singer Lizzo performs during the second day of the Nos Alive Festival in Oeiras, Portugal, 07 July 2023. The festival runs until 08 July 2023. (EPA)

Lizzo has been sued by three former dancers who accuse the Grammy winner of sexual harassment and allege the singer and her production company created a hostile work environment.

The civil lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court claims Lizzo pressured the dancers to engage with nude performers at a club in Amsterdam and shamed one of them for her weight gain before firing her.

Plaintiffs Arianna Davis, Crystal Williams and Noelle Rodriguez make numerous charges including sexual, religious and racial harassment, disability discrimination, assault and false imprisonment.

The legal complaint seeks unspecified damages and names Melissa Viviane Jefferson, known professionally as Lizzo, her production company Big Grrrl Big Touring, Inc., and Shirlene Quigley, captain of the performer’s dance team.

Representatives for Lizzo didn't immediately respond to emails seeking comment on the lawsuit.

The court filing claims that after performing a concert in Amsterdam, Lizzo and her crew attended a sexually themed show at a club in the city's notorious Red Light District where “Lizzo began inviting cast members to take turns touching the nude performers.” During the show, Lizzo led a chant pressuring Davis to touch a nude women performing at the club, the filing states.

“Finally, the chorus became overwhelming, and a mortified Ms. Davis acquiesced in an attempt to bring an end to the chants,” the complaint states. “Plaintiffs were aghast with how little regard Lizzo showed for the bodily autonomy of her employees and those around her, especially in the presence of many people whom she employed.”

Lizzo, who routinely champions body positivity, is also accused of calling out Davis for her weight gain after accusing the dancer of not being committed to her role. Davis was fired in May for recording a meeting during which Lizzo had given out notes to dancers about their performances, according to the complaint.

Quigley, who served as a judge on the singer's reality show “Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” is accused in the lawsuit of pushing her Christian beliefs onto dancers. The court filing claims Quigley referred to Davis as a “non-believer" and told co-workers that “No job and no one will stop me from talking about the Lord.”

Earlier this year, Lizzo won the Grammy for record of the year for her hit “About Damn Time." A global tour supporting her fourth studio album, 2022's “Special,” wrapped up last month.

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Hulu's 'Good American Family' with Ellen Pompeo Scrambles a Wild True-Crime Case

This image released by Disney shows Ellen Pompeo in a scene from "Good American Family." (Ser Baffo/Disney via AP)
This image released by Disney shows Ellen Pompeo in a scene from "Good American Family." (Ser Baffo/Disney via AP)
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Hulu's 'Good American Family' with Ellen Pompeo Scrambles a Wild True-Crime Case

This image released by Disney shows Ellen Pompeo in a scene from "Good American Family." (Ser Baffo/Disney via AP)
This image released by Disney shows Ellen Pompeo in a scene from "Good American Family." (Ser Baffo/Disney via AP)

If Ellen Pompeo was going to find a new role after 20 years as a series regular on ABC's "Grey's Anatomy," it had to be good. She thinks she found it as a supermom whose world collapses in Hulu's "Good American Family."

"I was looking for a real creative challenge. I think this was an opportunity for me to completely disappear into a role,″ she says. "Characters like this don't come along all that often."

"Good American Family" fictionalizes the true story of Natalia Grace, a Ukrainian-born orphan with dwarfism, adopted as a child by an American family who soon accuse her of being a troubled adult masquerading as a child.

Pompeo plays the adoptive mother, whose character has become a sought-after speaker and author after raising a son with autism but now finds herself at her breaking point with Natalia, her marriage strained, in legal jeopardy and her reputation in tatters.

"We were taking all of this research that we had and amplifying certain moments or adjusting certain moments for kind of dramatic license," says creator and co-showrunner Katie Robbins, who also created "Sunny" and wrote for "The Affair."

"The thing that was important was to tell a propulsive, compulsively watchable thing. But, at the end of the day, the most important thing was to tell it in an emotionally authentic way to the people involved."

Over the years, the case has been the focus of several TV shows, podcasts and documentaries, including Investigation Discovery's documentary series "The Curious Case of Natalia Grace."

If viewers hope to get clarity on who the heroes are, they'll not get it with "Good American Family." It tells the story from multiple points of view, flashing forward and back, to create a complex family drama that also has elements of a thriller.

"You really have to pay attention to who's doing the telling," says Robbins. "Using perspective felt like an opportunity both to tell the story in kind of a fresh way, but also to allow us as storytellers to take the viewers on an experience that would help them confront their own biases in unexpected ways."

The series starts from the perspective of the adoptive parents — Mark Duplass plays the husband — who eventually turn on their new family member, but then shifts to Natalia (played by Imogen Faith Reid), slowly cracking any snap judgements the viewer may have had going into it.

"Everybody comes into the experience of this story with sort of a different way of looking at it," says co-showrunner and executive producer Sarah Sutherland. "It's sort of like a Rorschach test. I just thought it was super-fascinating to sit with the kind of uncomfortableness of that."

The eight episodes that begin debuting Wednesday seamlessly blend darkness and light, showing moments of family levity but also scenes of terror, as when Natalia approaches her parents' bed with a knife.

"In terms of the tone, I am a firm believer that life is a real genre blend," says Robbins. "The happiest moments in my life have been undercut often with tragedy, and the saddest moments I've often found myself finding something absurdly hilarious. So everything that I write, I try to let all live in that sort of tension because that's what it is to be a person."

At its core, "Good American Family" is about how we are raised and how that can echo through generations. We learn how Pompeo's character was treated by her mother and how Natalia wasn't always raised with familial love, priming them for a face-off.

"We're examining the ways in which one is parented trickles down and affects the way that one is a parent," says Robbins. "It changes the way that you perceive the world. And I think that it's a fascinating thing that runs through the arc of this series."

Pompeo sees an even larger point — how everyone these days has their own definitive version of events and sees things though their own lens.

"Even if you know you're wrong, it takes an extraordinary amount of humility to admit you're wrong. It's so much easier to just go with it, stick to the ego and say, 'I wasn't wrong,'" she says.

"We see that with what's happening in our country right now. People will fight to the death before they admit they were wrong. It doesn't matter what we see, right?" she adds.

"We're seeing things before our eyes, and people are saying something else, and we're choosing to believe what was said instead of what we're seeing. And that is the human condition."