Miley Cyrus getting into a beef with someone isn’t really anything new these days. Hell, she threw shade at Nicki Minaj in one of her recently-released tracks for s**ts and giggles so this is pretty standard Miley behaviour.
Having said that though, her latest feud (if you want to even call it that) with a cake designer is less about being a s**tstirring badass and more about a celebrity being entitled and using their fame to strut about.
For those who aren’t up to speed on what I’m going on about, Miley recently teamed up with Planned Parenthood and Marc Jacobs for a campaign to fight Alabama’s controversial abortion law known as HB314.
As part of this campaign, she shared an image of herself licking a cake that has the words, “Abortion is healthcare,” written on it.
Now the campaign is cool but the actual cake used in Miley’s photo is less so because the singer was quickly called out by Washington D.C. based cake baker Becca Rea-Holloway, who runs a popular Insta account known as The Sweet Feminist, for stealing her cake design, which was made in May 2018.
In response to the cake design plagiarism accusations, Miley left an apology and promised to tag Becca in the post before asking her to “correct” her original post.
However, Becca wasn’t having any of it as she replied with, “This was not an oversight, it was blatantly and willfully neglectful and deceitful. I would have been more than happy to work with you on a collaboration for this project, but instead my work was just copied without compensation.”
On the surface, it seems like Miley did the right thing here by apologising and crediting Becca’s work, but the singer actually doing nothing more than strong-arming Becca into forgetting this whole thing with the innocent sounding “if you could please correct your post” request.
This whole saga just reeks of an entitled celebrity using their influence to get what they want, as well as setting a terrible precedent of celebs ripping off other people’s work without any consequence.
Newsweek reports that Becca’s cake design can’t be copyrighted under America’s copyright laws and the First Amendment, meaning that Miley can get away with this basically scot-free. What this also means is that some artists are now more vulnerable to having their work ripped off by some famous celeb and there’s nothing they can do about it.
To be fair, Miley did end up tagging Becca in her post so that’s, uh, something.
Sure is.
Since this whole cake design saga started, Becca has claimed that she’s received an overwhelming amount of horrible messages from Miley’s fanbase, as well as a lot of supportive comments from people who aren’t having any of this.
At the time of writing, Miley has yet to respond to Becca’s most recent comments, nor has there been an update on whether she compensated Becca for the cake design beyond tagging the The Sweet Feminist on her Instagram post.
It’s not hard.
This whole saga is definitely shed some light on the good and bad things whenever a mega popular celebrity decides to swing their influence about. It’s great that Miley is campaigning against Alabama’s abortion law but the way she’s going about it is just wrong.
She says she’s helping women with what she’s doing (which there is some merit to), but what she’s ultimately doing is hurting innocent bystanders and artists with her actions.
Here’s hoping this doesn’t start a worrying trend of celebrities lifting other people’s work because that’s the last thing we need on our long list of current problems.