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Heather Mills: Public Enemy #1?
20-Mar-2008
Written by: Sam Belkin
Where does our extreme hatred come from?
The media can destroy someone’s reputation, relationships, and maybe eventually his or her entire life. This is well known. What will remain a mystery, however, is how the public chooses sides.
Heather Mills, Paul McCartney’s soon-to-be ex-wife, is one such case. She’s been called many things in the press, and her most recent branding as “Liar” is probably the most pleasant.
Heather Mills is McCartney’s second wife, having had to follow in the footsteps of “Lovely Linda,” who died of breast cancer in 1998. She is a former model and an amputee. Having been hit by a police motorcycle in 1993, Mills had enough damage to her left leg to warrant amputation below the knee. She has since campaigned on behalf of related causes in order to provide aid for amputees. In addition, she campaigns for the curtailment of land mines and animal rights.
But according to Barbara Walters, she is “not a very nice person.” And according to The Sun, she is a “hooker, liar, porn star, fantasist, trouble maker, [and] shoplifter.” E! Online News’s most recent report on the divorce proceedings concerned Mills’s “fight to get her hands on Paul McCartney’s money.” Several other sources have dug up her early modeling photos, in which she simulated sexual acts with a male model and posed topless, and used them as “evidence” of her former prostitution. She is widely believed to be a “gold digger,” implying that she married the former Beatle strictly for his money. Even the police have become irritated with Mills, accusing her of using the emergency phone number too often, despite the fact that she receives death threats and is constantly pestered by violently intrusive paparazzi. Mills has revealed that she often feels suicidal, and that such accusations are worse than losing her leg.
Meanwhile, Paul McCartney gets off clean with merely a wave and his charming, still-boyish smile and Liverpool accent. We haven’t heard a word from him, really. What gives?
Anyone who knows the Beatles very intimately, which is many, knows that there’s a darker side to Paul’s endearing public persona. In fact, he’s never really been the innocent little Liverpoolian that he was initially dressed up to be on his arrival to the U.S. with the Beatles. Then again, he’s not all that bad either, at least to the public’s knowledge. But what made the blame fall where it did, and why so heavily? Where did all this hatred for Mills come from? Is it justified? Of course, certain sources berate the woman simply for higher ratings or more readers, but why does this sell? What makes the public love to hate her so much, and where did it start?
Barbara Walters described Mills as snobby, saying that she complained about her glass of water not being “room temperature” during an interview, scolding a man in Walters’s crew for it. Walters said that in her interview with Mills years before, however, she was moved by Mills’s courage and compassion. So it seems that Mills wasn’t always hated; only after her marriage to Paul did she inherit the role of public enemy number 1. Or maybe it was only after her marriage to Paul came to an end. Paul was the one who filed for divorce, citing “unreasonable behavior” as his reasoning. Mills claims it was partly due to McCartney’s daughter Stella, who she described as “jealous” and “evil.” Nobody can ever really know the truth.
Evidence shows that Mills may have turned into an unlikable woman after her marriage to Paul, but I’ve never seen such public outrage and hatred before … for anyone. It seems like she clocks in at a close second behind George W. Bush, for one of the most hated living people in the world. People are more concerned with the villainy of Heather Mills and her divorce proceedings than, say, the Sudanese government and their support of Janjaweed militias, which are intent on wiping out entire groups of people from the Darfur region. The amount of money Mills might receive incites more rancor than the number of slain Africans in western Sudan. Okay, maybe such a comparison is too heavy-handed. But evidence of the Sudanese civil war is enough to choose sides, enough to make one angry with its government.
Heather Mills is, at the very worst, a scummy celebrity. We’ve had plenty of those before. As far as I know, she doesn’t have dead bodies buried in her back yard, no history of fraud or embezzlement, just some racy photos that earned her some money when she was a young girl without a home. So what does the public know about Heather Mills that I don’t?
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