Cancel Culture - Melanie Martinez

Melanie Martinez is an interesting critter with a very strange past.

She had her first introduction to fame with being on season 3 of The Voice, a singing competition show. She was on Adam Lambert's team, and made it to top 6.

After leaving The Voice Melanie released her first single, "Dollhouse" and signed a deal with Atlantic Records to release her debut EP Dollhouse in 2014.

After about a year she started releasing singles for her next project, that will later be titled Crybaby. This project was a concept album, with the main character being named "Crybaby" and it followed a fictional story of this character dealing with issues throughout her life, either by her family or other circumstances. The character was often depicted wearing children's clothes, and the other characters within this universe were also depicted wearing children's clothing (this will be important later.)

Melanie then released her next studio album titled K-12 in 2019, which was released alongside a movie. It follows Crybaby as she goes through the grades with each song, a fun concept, but again, following the children's clothing and school aesthetic.

In December of 2017, a woman named Timothy Heller who was once friends with Melanie, posted on twitter, alleging that Melanie Martinez had sexual assaulted her two years earlier. She claimed that Melanie had gotten her high and groped her, as well as constantly pressuring her to talk about sexual preferences and other topics. This sparked loads of controversy, and even started a trending hashtag: melaniemartinezisoverparty. (I would include the #, but I don't want it to actually be a hashtag in this post D: ). People were using this to finally give a driving force to their hatred for the singer, people burned their vinyl records of Crybaby and posted it online, it was a lot.

The next day Melanie issued her statement on twitter, stating that "[Timothy] never said no to what were doing" which made my trust weary in her.

Time passed, and for awhile Melanie was somewhat of a shunned figure on the internet. Of course her die-hard fans were there for her, lashing out against Timothy and those that supported her. I remember being shaky in like of her, I went to her Dollhouse Tour, and her Crybaby Tour, before any of the allegations had come out. I was a fan, but these really rubbed me the wrong way. Specifically how Melanie phrased her sentence, "never said no to what we did together", it feels slimy.

More time passed and she started releasing snippets and singles for her next project K-12, and I remember hearing something that Timothy had admitted to lying, and at the time, I just wanted a reason to listen to Melanie's music again, so I didn't look into the legitimacy of what was said.

Then comes 2024, Timothy got onto TikTok and brought up this situation again, stating that she never admitted to lying, and was never proven of lying. This got brought up after the release of her third studio album Portals where the childish motif was finally put to rest(literally, the first song is about Crybaby dying).

So now I'm in a bit of a hazy middle ground, only recently did I fully read what Timothy had stated on TikTok, so now I'm thinking a lot about this again. I remember thinking that her bringing up her past with Melanie was for clout-chasing purposes, but now that I've fully digested what she said, I don't know. I've also seen a lot of people comment even more about the, admittedly, weird childish motif she had for so long in her music. Constantly having the people in the videos dress as children, and use childish references while dealing with extremely dark or even sexual material.

This is more about my own feelings, I don't listen to her much at all anymore, because I felt weird supporting an artist that was so comfortable sexualizing that kind of material. I still feel weird. Part of me wants to separate the art from the artist, but that motif is so strong, and it just feels so slimy along with the solid allegations towards her from Timothy.

This feels a lot less of a grey area for me, the way she responded to the allegations really rubbed me the wrong way, and then the child motif really freaks me out. I don't think her side of the story has been explored at all, and the way she defended herself was objectively, not great.