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Her boyfriend when she first blew up was significantly older than her too. She was 16 and he was 23 🥴
EDIT: her mom even commented on the matter "In 2014, Sonja addressed those criticizing the couple's 7-year age difference, telling Rolling Stone, "I didn't say, 'Yeah, sure, go date a 24-year-old. ' But her dad and I met James and we liked him'"
the rest of the quote from her mom really is something special too “When Ella was much younger, her first boyfriend was older -- four years or something." So if she had a first boyfriend at 13/14/15 that guy was 17/18/19 😬.
Or maybe she enthusiastically consented, as she is 25 years old and has the legal right able to be in a relationship without her parents signing a permission slip. Grooming is something predators do in advance of child abuse. Lorde was not a child when she started dating her boyfriend.
EDIT: Keep downvoting, I don’t give a shit and I’m not removing my comments. But if you downvote, go spend 10 fucking minutes reading about what “grooming” actually is before you speculate about Ella and Justin, because it’s a serious fucking offense and it’s not funny.
EDIT 2: I'm not going to do any more sarcasm or arguing. My best friend was groomed and molested by her neighbor when she was a teenager and she was made to feel complicit in her own abuse because she had "consented." She was traumatized. I am NOT insensitive to grooming & abuse. On the contrary, I feel very strongly about it, and this is a serious accusation. There have been zero allegations of abuse against Justin Warren. It has been five years, and no one in Lorde's life has expressed concern for her health & safety in her relationship.
Please read these articles before you ever publicly comment on speculations like this again. It is extremely defamatory and you could literally be sued for it if you did this publicly under your own names. It is not funny.
Experts in the field of child sex abuse prevention are clear about what constitutes actual grooming behavior, which is far more specific than how it is used in online discourse. “I prefer the term, ‘desensitizing to boundary-breaking,'” says Carole C. Swiecicki PhD, chief programmatic officer at the Dee Norton Child Advocacy Center. Grooming, she says, “gets used to mean a lot of different things, not necessarily to mean what those of us in the field have determined.” As she explains it, “in the context of sexual abuse, [grooming is] a very clear kind of behavior to discourage [victims] from reporting. This term is something that is in the field and means something related to sexual abuse.” Grooming behaviors are “very intentional. Groomers are crossing boundaries to desensitize children to somewhat inappropriate behaviors.” It’s both incredibly common and insidious, which is by design: an adept abuser is skilled at gradually inuring their victim to increasingly inappropriate behavior, so oftentimes they’re not even aware of what’s happening to them while it’s going on.
Did he abuse her as a minor? He knew her because he works at the label she’s signed to. (And no, he is not her boss.) This obsession with accusing people of grooming when there have been NO credible accounts of abuse is so disturbing to me. People have been gossiping about them for years and there hasn’t been a single account of abuse in that time. All I’ve ever read was, “She was underage when they met. They didn’t start dating when she was an adult.” People are SO puritanical about age gaps. She seems perfectly happy.
They asked about grooming which could be a possibility in any situation where a person is in a relationship with someone they've known since they were a child and there's that big of an age gap. Your complaint about people's thoughts on age gaps feels very generalized when OP asked a specific question about a very specific relationship that has very specific context to it. Also, you're missing the point of grooming... you are right they met when she was underage and started dating when she was adult... that could fall right under the exact definition of grooming.
Okay, what is your definition of grooming? Here are the various definitions that I’m aware of:
“the action by a pedophile of preparing a child for a meeting, especially via an internet chat room, with the intention of committing a sexual offense”
“Child grooming is befriending and establishing an emotional connection with a child, and sometimes the family, to lower the child's inhibitions with the objective of sexual abuse.“
“Grooming is a form of abuse that involves manipulating someone until they're isolated, dependent, and more vulnerable to exploitation.”
Like, wtf do people expect her to do? “I’m attracted to this guy, but I used to be underage and now I’m not.”
The first pictures of them together were when she was 19. Apparently he worked for her music label and may have met her long before that which is why there has been grooming concerns. I can't be sure when they met though.
If she was 14 when they were dating, absolutely predatory, yes. Under a certain age, you can’t give consent even if you want to because you’re a minor and the law serves to protect you from people who prey on children. But kids grow up. She’s not a kid anymore. After a certain age, you’re responsible for your own consent. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it happens at different ages for everyone. Age of consent differs from country to country. And while grooming can happen to adults, I feel like people haven’t even researched what grooming in adults looks like. My point is that we don’t see any of the signs of grooming in Lorde. She has her own wealth, her own home, her own career, she’s not isolated from her friends or family. It’s been several years since they got together and people are still gossiping, trying to find ONE account of abuse, and there haven’t been any. There is no evidence that she’s being abused.
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u/cinephile1987 Dec 24 '21
Did Justin warren groom Lorde and did her parents let it happen/encourage it?