Jennifer Lopez Is Sorry She Played Turkmenistan Dictator’s Birthday, But Not Enough To Return The Money

By Alyssa Rosenberg posted from ThinkProgress Alyssa on Jul 1, 2013 at 10:36 am

Credit: Adelaide Today

In the kind of headline that’s become quite frequent in recent years, Jennifer Lopez has found herself in hot water for playing the 56th birthday of Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the president of Turkmenistan, a country with a deeply terrible human rights record, and oil reserves that havefueled its leaders’ personal extravagance and eccentricities. Lopez’s representatives have tried to sidestep any association between Lopez and the regime by arguing that she was invited by China National Petroleum Corporation as part of “a private corporate event that was presented to their local executives in Turkmenistan,” as if an invitation from China’s state-owned oil and gas company had no geopolitical implications whatsoever.

And as of yesterday, they’re playing a different card that celebrities before her have tried to deploy: total ignorance. Huffington Post reports:

Lopez’s publicist says the event was vetted by Lopez’s staff: “Had there been knowledge of human rights issues any kind, Jennifer would not have attended.” The birthday serenade was a last-minute request made by the corporation to Lopez before she took the stage, and she “graciously obliged,” the statement said. Lopez is the latest celebrity to face scrutiny for performing in countries or for leaders with human rights violations. In 2011, Oscar-winning actress Hilary Swank profusely apologized after attending a birthday party for Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who had been accused of torture and killings; she said she didn’t have a full understanding of the event. Beyonce, Nelly Furtado, 50 Cent, Mariah Carey and Usher were paid handsomely to perform at parties linked to the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. All later announced plans to donate their performance fees to charity and said they hadn’t known the leader was connected to terrorism.

This is a patently ludicrous attempt at a dodge even if Lopez and her people are sticking to their story that they had no idea she’d be singing for Berdymukhamedov, and saw China National Petroleum Corporation as her only client. The Corporation’s been boycotted over its work in Sudan, accused of human rights abuses in Burma, and faced charges over the environmental impacts of its projects. It’s possible to find out about all of these controversies with thirty seconds of Googling, and if Lopez truly didn’t want to be associated with even the suggestion of any of these sorts of problems, that should have been enough for her representatives to make a call on the event. If they wanted to investigate their veracity, that might have taken them longer, but it’s not as if Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, or Human Rights Watch don’t pick up the phone when a celebrity’s representatives call.
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