Obama’s daughter is entitled to some privacy
I’m not above celebrity gossip. I love the “Who Wore it Better?” page just as much as the next girl killing time on the toilet — and I will buy any tabloid bearing news about the unravelling of Brangelina.
But there is one breed of celebrity gossip I can’t bring myself to relish because it feels so fundamentally unfair: that is the celebrity gossip surrounding people who did not choose to be famous and have made no wilful commitment (as the Royals have) to life in the public eye. Take Malia Obama, as a prime example. The 19-year-old daughter of former U.S. president Barack Obama appears at this moment to be trying her very best to smoke cigarettes and kiss guys at tailgate parties (as all first-year college students should have a right to do). But she cannot escape the glare of the international press.
Obama, a freshman at Harvard University, was recently photographed by paparazzi at a university football game smoking and locking lips with an Englishman believed to be 19-year-old Harvard student Rory Farquharson.
After TMZ released footage of the students snogging at a pre-game party, it appears as though every foreign paper and its subsidiary has picked up the story and done a deep dive into the life and times of Mr. Farquharson.
I now know more about the teenage rugby player and his esteemed parents, cousins and grandparents than I do about my own family history.
His dad’s an investment banker, his mum’s an accountant and, in case you’re curious about Farquharson’s distant and deceased relations, the Telegraph in the U.K., has got you covered: “Rory’s great uncle was Sir Donald Farquharson who, during an illustrious legal career, was the presiding judge who jailed Lester Piggott for three years after the champion jockey admitted a £3 million tax fraud.”
The Telegraph also managed to track down a barmaid at a Suffolk, England pub called the Red Lion, located near the Farquharsons’ family home, who told the newspaper “Everyone is given a warm welcome here — it’d be lovely if the Obamas came to visit.”
They kissed one time, for all we know! It might have been a bad kiss. Malia may not even like him anymore. She could very well have already moved on to another British guy with an even wackier last name and an even more storied family history.
The point being, isn’t it a bit early for us to dig into the guy’s past and interview bartenders at his parents’ local pub? It would be a different matter entirely (though still unconscionably invasive) if Rory Farquharson was Malia Obama’s longtime beau or fiancé, but he’s not. He is a guy she may have made out with (possibly tipsy) at a party.
Can you imagine being a teenager whose every fling, no matter how insignificant, provokes international media attention and, presumably in this case, a concerned phone call from your parents?
What’s uniquely cruel about the spotlight shone onto the kids of celebrities and politicians is that, in most cases, they didn’t invite it. They didn’t invite it even in the way child stars like Justin Bieber did. Malia Obama didn’t upload videos onto YouTube playing acoustic guitar hoping to be discovered. She was drawn into somebody else’s spotlight and she will remain there forever.
The same is true for 11-year-old Barron Trump, whose media hellride is only just beginning. This is probably why, among the kids of former U.S. presidents, support for the privacy of First Children is bipartisan. “It’s high time the media & everyone leave Barron Trump alone & let him have the private childhood he deserves,” Chelsea Clinton tweeted earlier this year, after some in the press criticized the 11-year-old for his apparently less than dapper fashion sense (God forbid, he wore a graphic T-shirt on board Air Force One).
Malia Obama is not a child anymore. But this doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be afforded at least a sliver of the privacy enjoyed by the average North American college girl. She appears to want to smoke cigarettes and make out with lanky British guys. Let’s give her the space to do so in peace.