Why Do Harry Styles Fans Hate Olivia Wilde?

It was never going to be easy being Harry Styles’ girlfriend.

We’ve seen what happens to women in the public eye who dare to date an international heartthrob over the past few decades and little has changed. Still, nobody would blame Olivia Wilde for being surprised by the absolute viciousness of certain subsets of the internet when it was revealed that she’d paired up with Styles following the shooting of their film Don’t Worry Darling. The actress-director, who was previously in a long-term relationship with Jason Sudeikis, has been thoroughly lambasted on social media and conspiracy-adjacent gossip blogs for her romance.

Take a gander on social media and you’ll see a fascinating and exhaustive barrage of anger towards Wilde that veers from the petty to the outright dangerous.

When the news first emerged in January of last year, Wilde was forced to limit comments on her Instagram page after she was overwhelmed with negative messages. As noted by BuzzFeed, Wilde was told she should be “ashamed” of herself for “stealing” Styles and that their relationship was “embarrassing.” Some especially vocal Styles fans accuse her of being a bad mother who abandoned her children for a new boyfriend. The Tumblr tag #fauxlivia is home to much of this, as well as accusations that Wilde is “fake,” a “leech,” and only with Styles for attention.

Nudes were repeatedly posted with further body- and slut-shaming remarks. An intimate video showing a woman who appeared to be Wilde (the authenticity of which was never confirmed) went viral on social media, shared by Styles obsessives. She’s faced immense ageism and been accused of grooming him because of their 10-year age gap (forgetting the fact that Styles isn’t a child and is now pushing 30.)

Threads have been put together offering exhaustively detailed “evidence” of Wilde’s various misdeeds, listing everything from old dodgy tweets to “blackface for looking very tanned in a photoshoot. She was also criticized for wearing a James Brown T-shirt, as he had been accused of domestic violence against his wife.

One blog claimed she “attracts offenders” because she has either worked with or been photographed near the likes of Kevin Spacey and Brett Ratner. An especially cruel viral tweet smarmily declared that Wilde “gives the same vibes as Amber Heard,” evoking the recent hate campaign against the latter as reason to be suspicious of their latest target.

A 2015 Defamer article about Harvey Weinstein claimed that Weinstein “proposed a threesome” with a model “between the two of them and Olivia Wilde” in exchange for acting work. This was weaponized by many Styles fans as evidence that Wilde either collaborated with Weinstein or was a predator on the same scale as him. The hashtag #timesupolivia has been used to spread the most insidious of the hatred, including repeatedly comparing Wilde to a sexual predator and positioning Styles as her victim. It is preferable for these people to imagine their idol as a traumatized prisoner rather than as an autonomous being.

It is worth noting that many Styles fans have spoken out in support of Wilde, calling out the abuse and condemning the tactics used to hurt her. The anger that this subset represents is not indicative of the entire fandom’s beliefs. Often, they are a minority, albeit an extremely loud and well-organized one that hogs up most of the attention. Still, that such responses exist at all speaks volumes to how people in the public eye are engaged in a fan battle where the goalposts are always moving.

For her part, Wilde hasn’t directly discussed these attacks and has kept her romance with Styles, unsurprisingly, pretty low-key. What she’s experiencing is, alas, not a new phenomenon. Name a famous couple from the past century of Hollywood lore and it’ll take you no time at all to find excessive amounts of bullying directed at one of them, usually the woman, from Elizabeth Taylor to Cybill Shepherd to Angelina Jolie and beyond. Wilde, in this sense, joins a “proud” lineage of shamed women. But in the age of social media and the ever-blurring lines between celebrity and fans, it’s hard to overlook the specific volume of what she faces.

The hostility directed towards Wilde is a two-pronged demonstration of how celebrity relationships inspire certain kinds of fan anger: first, there is the typical misogyny of a woman daring to date a male star who is adored by a majority female fanbase; and then there are the conspiracies that surround said star insisting he is actually in a secret relationship with someone else. In this case, Styles has been the subject of many baseless claims that he’s in a long-term partnership with former One Direction co-member Louis Tomlinson.

The Larry Stylinson theory has fueled much fanfiction, with videos micro-analyzed for proof of their secret love, which was being kept in the dark by the insidious powers of Simon Cowell, their record…