Poor Justin Timberlake… these are three words I never would have imagined I would be able to type 25 years ago, 15 years ago, or even 5 years ago.
Mr. Timberlake is a “Mickey Mouse Club” veteran turned boy band favorite turned part of one of the millennial power couples with Britney Spears turned platinum-selling, Grammy-winning solo artist and guest host on “Saturday Night Live.” And now, as the world knows, the man was arrested in the Hamptons early Tuesday morning and charged with drunk driving.
Page Six added salt to the wound by reporting that the arresting officer had no idea who the attacker was. After Timberlake tweeted that his arrest was ruining his tour, the officer reportedly asked, “What tour?” According to People, “the internet couldn't stop laughing.” Among the jokes were that his arrest might inspire everyone at X to become pro-police for a day, and that Timberlake should have paid more attention to taking a cab home than bringing Sexy back. Streams of Britney Spears' song “Criminal” skyrocket. Brutal memes go viral.
Celebrity misfortunes always spark uproar over the misfortunes of others, but this seems on another level. As we scroll through and laugh our heads off, are fans rallying to his defence? Why are we all having so much fun?
The answer is that this isn't your average celebrity. It's a man who has long seemed to many people the epitome of undeserved good fortune: privilege. He's a gifted performer, a talented singer, a fascinating actor. But his greatest talent may be getting away with it.
Over the years, Timberlake hasn't escaped controversy, he's just escaped its consequences. Time and again, he's escaped unscathed, looking and feeling perfectly fine, while those around him have been busy trying to sort it out.
When Timberlake and Spears split in 2002, his story — hinted at in interviews, played out in music videos and alluded to in a mash-up of “What Goes Around … Comes Around,” “Rehab” and “Crazy” — was that she'd cheated on him and broken his heart. The world was happy to believe him. “You did something that caused him so much pain,” Diane Sawyer told Spears in a 2003 interview. “What did you do to cause him so much pain?”
Then, in 2004, Timberlake attended Janet Jackson's Super Bowl halftime show. We all know what happened after that. At one point, the choreography was supposed to remove Janet's bustier, but in what was later euphemistically described as a wardrobe malfunction, her entire chest was exposed. Somehow, Jackson was publicly censured. A week later, Timberlake won a Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance at the show from which Jackson was disinvited.
Along the way, some observers began to accuse Timberlake of appropriating black culture (R&B, gospel, hip hop) without championing black people, but that didn't stop single after single from rocketing to the top of the charts.
Then the Black Lives Matter movement encouraged more people to consider the role race plays in determining who succeeds and who fails, whose careers stall and whose soar, who walks away from a traffic stop. And the #MeToo movement made people more skeptical of men's misbehavior and more likely to trust women. When Spears' memoir was published last year, she told her side of the story: that Timberlake cheated on her, then dumped her by text. She also revealed that she had become pregnant, and that he had insisted on an abortion while he played his guitar while she writhed in agony on the bathroom floor.
This time, it seems many readers believed her. They also seemed to relish the chance to poke fun at him. Even Michelle Williams, who narrated the audiobook, had a lot of fun imitating the line he supposedly says: “Oh yeah! Foci, foci! Ginuwine! How's it going, buddy?”
Following the release of a documentary about Spears in 2021, Timberlake apologized on social media.
“I want to apologize separately to both Britney Spears and Janet Jackson because I care about and respect them and I know I failed,” he said. “I also feel compelled to respond because everyone involved deserves to be treated better and above all, this is a larger conversation I wholeheartedly want to be a part of and grow from.”
Justin Timberlake's rise over the past few years has made him seem less like pop's Prince Charming and more like a perpetual exploiter of women and black music and culture, a man of undeserved privilege and undeserved success who's been dealt a long-awaited pie in the pudding. Which is why many were inclined to see his arrest this week as a kind of deferred karma.
I confess, I'm one of them: Part of me wants to believe that once the ultimate Teflon-coated rich white guy can no longer charm his way out of trouble, there might be a larger cultural upheaval underway.
But there's also a part of me that wanted to believe that Donald Trump would be held accountable for the “Access Hollywood” tape. And he didn't.
This is the same part of the story that thought Christine Blasey Ford's allegations would cripple Brett Kavanaugh's chances of becoming a Supreme Court justice. But that didn't happen.
This is the same part where you'd expect Matt Lauer to never utter the word comeback due to the allegations he said he felt “embarrassed and ashamed of.” But he did come back. Multiple times.
Cancelled white men rarely stay cancelled; all we can hope for seems to be a chance to momentarily hold them accountable for their actions. Meanwhile, the cultural tides that prompted people to reconsider Timberlake's actions, if they truly did shift at all, are beginning to reverse.
Corporations that introduced major DEI initiatives just a few years ago are shrinking, consolidating, or completely eliminating their diversity departments. Republican lawmakers are enthusiastically banning DEI in higher education. In publishing, many of the Black editors hired at scale in recent years have lost their jobs, and Black authors still represent fewer than 10% of the novels published each year by major conglomerates. Meanwhile, Roe v. Wade was two years ago, and Donald Trump, whose Supreme Court nominations ensured its demise, is leading the polls.
Remember Timberlake's social media apology a few years back? In January of this year, during a concert in New York City, he announced that he was apologizing to “absolutely” — and, expletive included, “everyone.”
The memes are hilarious, the tweets even hilarious, but the most likely scenario is that Justin Timberlake will be fine. And even if he isn't, there will be guys like him trying to take his place, and the system that allows him to thrive is less fragile than the guys who have benefited from it for years.
