Last night, the world received news that beloved sitcom star Alan Thicke had passed away after suffering a heart attack while playing ice hockey with his son.
Millions have mourned Thicke on social media, many of them celebrities who knew the actor personally and shared firsthand of accounts of his warmth and generosity.
Nicole Arbour was not one of those celebrities.
You might remember Arbour from her vile attempt at viral fame, “Dear Fat People“, which earned her the title of “deplorable” months before racists in red baseball caps brought the word back into fashion.
Arbour has spent the past year doing everything in her power to claw her way up from Z-list obscurity, including trash-talking actual celebrities and forming unintentionally hilarious hip hop groups with obscure reality stars.
She’s never one to let a trending hashtag slip through her fingers, so it’s not surprising that she tweeted about the passing of Alan Thicke.
What is surprising is the alleged nature of her sole encounter with Thicke:
This morning, Arbour tweeted and deleted the above allegation that Thicke sexually harassed while she was working as a model.
Obviously, this is a complex issue.
Matters of sexual assault and harassment should always be brought to light, but maybe leveling an accusation via hashtag less than 24 hours after the alleged perpetrator’s death isn’t the best way to handle the situation?
Of course, Arbour’s ongoing attempts to make a career out of online trolling and harassment likely won’t help her case in the court of public opinion.
But should the timing of the tweet and Arbour’s past have any impact on her right to share her experience?
Absolutely not.
But that doesn’t mean that you’re victim-shaming if Arbour’s need to hashtag Thicke’s name and level the charge while he’s still a trending topic leaves a bit of a bad taste in your mouth.
Given her well-established desire for online fame, it’s likely that many will question Arbour’s motives in going public with allegations against Thicke.
We’d like to caution against that, as it’s an extremely slippery slope that leads to the sort of disgusting incentive-questioning we saw in the cases of Bill Cosby and Donald Trump.
Instead, we prefer to think that Arbour quickly realized there was something vaguely skeevy about the tweet, hence why she quickly deleted it.
Again, it’s her right to state her case however she sees fit.
But we can’t help but think there are better ways for Arbour to make her accusation.
