Rachel Zegler has defended Taylor Swift amid "cruel" comments over her alleged brewing romance with Travis Kelce.
The 22-year-old West Side Story star knows the feeling of backlash all too well and now she's coming to the aid of the Grammy-award-winning singer after she was slammed for appearing at yet another Kansas Chiefs game to support her latest love interest.
Taking to Twitter, better known now as X, the star responded to a disgusting video posted by Barstool Sports personality Dan Katz.
"If Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift release a sex video, I'll consummate this relationship and be like, 'Fine. You guys can have sex, you can be boyfriend/girlfriend.' I don't buy it... until that happens, I think it's fake, I think it's for clicks, and I think Taylor Swift is using the NFL to try to make her star bigger," Katz said in the clip.
Have a look below:While watching two men completely berate and make vulgar comments about the 33-year-old was difficult enough to stomach, the caption that it was paired with added insult to injury.
"If Taylor Swift is going to be taking over our Sunday’s I’m going to need to see a sex tape. These are my demands," the controversial post claimed.
In response, the actress reposted the video, slamming the media as "cruel" for their commentary about Swift in relation to her involvement with Kelce.
"It’s not news that the media is particularly (and unwarrantedly) cruel to Taylor Swift but the way men feel entitled to speak about women, their bodies, and their sex lives needs to be seriously evaluated," Zegler said in a tweet.
In a few follow-up posts, she elaborated on her response.
"You will never see people speaking this way about a man," she continued. "That goes for a lot of different scenarios. We do not pick apart men’s attitudes and relationships the way we do women’s and it’s not always just men who speak this way about us. Women can and do, too. It sucks."
After urging people to "leave Taylor Swift alone", Zegler also added: "Seeing a lot of 'it’s a joke' but you’ve got to understand that since the beginning of time 'you can’t take a joke' has been synonymous with 'let me say a horrible thing about women without suffering the consequences' — we’re sick and tired! It’s never been funny! Get a life!"
Thousands of others also agreed.
"THIS!!!! Our bodies, safety, and sexuality have always been a joke to them and every time we try to speak up about it we get labeled as emotional and weak," one user wrote while another added: "The fact that’s it’s been years of this too. And the moment she [Swift] goes back into dating the narrative starts again. It’s ridiculous."
A third tweet also stated: "The obsession men have with sex and porn is so exhausting."
Zegler has also been on the receiving end of overwhelming backlash herself.
Just last year she faced a media storm after she made some comments about the 1937 version of the movie Snow White which recently viral again on TikTok in August.
In the video, which was a snippet taken from Disney's D23 Expo in California, Zegler claimed the movie was "weird" and even went on to brand the prince a "stalker."
"The original cartoon came out in 1937, and very evidently so," she said at the time. "There's a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird! Weird! So we didn't do that this time."
She continued: "We have a different approach to what I'm sure a lot of people will assume is a love story just because we cast a guy in the movie. All of Andrew's [Burnap] scenes could get cut, who knows? It's Hollywood, baby!"
The actress also admitted that she was "scared" of the original movie.
"I think I watched it once and never picked it up again. I'm being so serious," she said in the interview alongside Gal Gadot, who played the Evil Queen. "I watched it once, and then I went on the ride in Disney World, which was called Snow White's Scary Adventures. Doesn't sound like something a little kid would like.
"I was terrified of it, never revisited Snow White again," she added.
In a follow-up interview with Variety, she clarified her stance, stating that rather than trying to overwrite the original, she was hoping to bring a more modern twist to it.
"I just mean that it's no longer 1937. She's not going to be saved by the prince and she's not going to be dreaming about true love," Zegler said.
"She's dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true," she added.
