LOS ANGELES (CNS) - Three former backup dancers for Lizzo have filed court papers accusing the Grammy-winning singer and her production company of weight-shaming them and forcing them to take part in sex shows and endure sexually denigrating behavior.
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In a lawsuit submitted to Los Angeles Superior Court but not yet officially filed, Crystal Williams, Arianna Davis and Noelle Rodriguez make allegations of a hostile work environment, failure to prevent or remedy a hostile work environment, religious harassment, failure to prevent religious harassment, disability discrimination, assault and false imprisonment.
Representatives for Lizzo -- whose real name is Melissa Jefferson -- and the Big Grrrls Big Touring company could not be reached for comment.
"The stunning nature of how Lizzo and her management team treated their performers seems to go against everything Lizzo stands for publicly, while privately she weight-shames her dancers and demeans them in ways that are not only illegal but absolutely demoralizing," the dancers' attorney Ron Zambrano said in a statement announcing the legal action.
According to the lawsuit, Davis and Williams met Lizzo in March 2021 while preparing to be contestants on the singer's reality show, "Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls." They also then met Shirlene Quigley, a judge on the show and the dance team captain. Quigley is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges that Quigley routinely preached her Christian religious beliefs to the defendants, and when she found out that Davis was a virgin, Quigley would routinely bring it up in conversations and even discussed it in interviews that were later posted to social media, "broadcasting an intensely personal detail ... to the world."
Rodriguez was hired in May 2021 to appear in Lizzo's "Rumors" music video.
Once the three plaintiffs were chosen as backup dancers for Lizzo, Quigley continued to preach Christianity while deriding premarital sex and routinely discussing her sex life with her husband, according to the suit.
During a February 2023 tour stop in Amsterdam, Lizzo invited the dancers to the Red Light District and took them to a bar that featured nude performers, according to the suit. The complaint alleges that Lizzo invited dancers to touch and interact with the nude performers in a sexually charged atmosphere, then pressured Davis to touch the breasts of one of the nude female performers, to which Davis eventually acquiesced, fearing it might affect her job if she didn't.
The suit also contends Lizzo took dancers and crew to a nude cabaret bar in Paris the following week.
The plaintiffs also allege that management of Big Grrrl Big Touring treated Black members of the team differently, accusing them of "being lazy, unprofessional and having bad attitudes."
"Only the dance cast -- comprised of full-figured women of color -- were ever spoken to in this manner, giving Plaintiffs the impression that these comments were charged with racial and fat-phobic animus," the suit contends.
According to the suit, Lizzo and another choreographer confronted Davis in an April 2023 conversation that included questions that were "thinly veiled concerns about Ms. Davis' weight gain, which Lizzo had previously called attention to after noticing it at the South by Southwest music festival."
The suit alleges that Williams was fired under the guise of budget cuts, while Davis was fired in May 2023 for recording a meeting the dancers had with Lizzo about their performances. Rodriguez quit after seeing Williams and Davis get fired, prompting what the lawsuit describes as an angry response from Lizzo.
"Lizzo aggressively approached Ms. Rodriguez, cracking her knuckles, balling her fists, and exclaiming, `You're lucky. You're so (expletive) lucky!"' the suit states. "Ms. Rodriguez feared that Lizzo intended to hit her and would have done so if one of the other dancers had not intervened."
The suit seeks unspecified damages.
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