Greetings, Meteor readers,

It’s last call for any of you wanting to participate in our March Madness challenge! Just click the button below to join our group and share your women’s bracket. And don’t forget, the best way to support women’s sports is to watch: Most games will be available on ESPN2 or ESPNU, but UConn v. Jackson State and Iowa v. Holy Cross—featuring Paige Bueckers and Caitlin Clark, of course—will be on ABC.

In today’s newsletter, I promise not to speak further of basketball. Instead, Samhita Mukhopadhyay walks us through Oprah’s weight loss special. Plus, a new book for your TBR pile and a princess sighting.

Ball is life,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

Oprah is done with the fat shaming…again: ICYMI, Oprah has another special out about weight shame and drugs like Ozempic. Released yesterday on the heels of her decision to step down from the Weight Watchers board and share with the public that she herself is on a semaglutide (the much talked about class of drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro), the show was an effort at busting common myths around obesity. As someone who’s written about the topic, I thought I’d break down the good and less-good coverage:

The good: She emphasized one of the most groundbreaking shifts in thinking that has come thanks to the popularity of these new “obesity meds”—the understanding that weight gain is not solely connected to your willpower. People often discriminate against and hate fat bodies because they believe fat people lack the personal control not to be fat, and, for this reason, deserve the shame and admonishment we as a society dole out to them. In developing drugs that address physiological components, science is confirming what fat activists have long said: Some of our bodies are just different, and the only path forward is to accept that.

But here’s where the special missed the mark: Rather than rethink what our hatred of fat bodies means for society and medical institutions—something that would be groundbreaking for Oprah to do—she purports that one of the only ways to eradicate this stigma is to become unfat, most notably through the help of this new class of drugs. (The special features several weight loss “success” stories of people whose lives changed dramatically by taking a semaglutide). But why is being fat something that needs to be solved? It’s great that Oprah is undoing the shame we feel around our decision to take these drugs—but perhaps it’s also okay to just be fat. (FWIW, I believe Oprah knows this truth; it’s just not an easy one to get across in primetime.) The only people who should really feel shame are those who continue to perpetuate the idea that the only way to live a healthy, happy life is to be thin.

For more on how Oprah has contributed to how we talk and think about weight loss, check out this episode of In Retrospect about her lifelong, public battle with her weight and what it’s meant for the culture. At the top of her special, Oprah admits she gave in to the pressure to apologize for her weight and refuses to do so anymore. I’m happy for her. But what would it look like to embrace such an attitude without also recentering thinness?

AND: 

• A new report from the United Nations World Food Programme has determined that a famine is “imminent” in northern Gaza. “The speed at which this man-made hunger and malnutrition crisis has ripped through Gaza is terrifying,” said the WFP’s executive director. “There is a very small window left to prevent an outright famine, and to do that, we need immediate and full access to the north. If we wait until famine has been declared, it’s too late.” While the WFP notes that getting food trucks into Gaza as a core issue, just last month, a food convoy that did make it across became the scene of a massacre, as more than 100 Palestinians were killed when Israeli soldiers opened fire into a crowd trying to get flour.

• Since its creation in 2020, the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award has honored women of note. This year, however, the group who presents the award is switching things up by giving the award to (you will not believe this list): Elon Musk, Sylvester Stallone, Martha Stewart, Michael Milken, and Rupert Murdoch. To no one’s surprise, RBG’s family was astounded at these choices and came out strongly against them, saying, “the decision to bestow upon them the particular honor of the RBG Award is a striking betrayal of the Justice’s legacy.”

• Speaking of the Robed Ones, Christine Blasey Ford’s memoir, One Way Back, hit shelves today. In it, she traces the arc of her life before, during, and after her groundbreaking testimony in front of the 2018 Senate Judiciary Committee, to whom she described being assaulted by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In one of the most powerful sections, she tallies the emotional and financial costs of testifying (she has needed security detail due to years of death threats). “If I, with all my privileges, could barely afford to speak out,” she writes, “what did that mean for so many other women?” (For background, listen to her groundbreaking conversation with Anita Hill in our Because of Anita podcast.)

• Spotted: Catherine, Princess of Wales, walking through a market admiring bread loaves in Windsor. Nothing suspicious about a member of the royal family doing their own grocery shopping, right? The footage of the Princess was confirmed as authentic by TMZ, but I’m still left wondering how there’s only one video of the most looked-for woman in the world right now taking a jaunt about town. Can we get the Swifties on this?

ONE WOMAN’S FIGHT

“This Isn’t Speedy or Fair”

Lauren Smith’s waited over four years for her day in court. 

BY NEDA TOLOUI-SEMNANI

LAUREN SMITH HAS BEEN SEPARATED FROM HER YOUNGEST CHILD FOR FIVE YEARS. (IMAGE VIA THE METEOR)

Four months ago, I wrote in this space about Lauren Smith, a 32-year-old mother who lost custody of her youngest child in 2019 after she and her infant tested positive for THC, a cannabinoid substance, at delivery. Smith was arrested six months later and charged with felony child neglect for using marijuana while pregnant—a charge which, in Greenville, South Carolina, carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

When we published the article, Smith’s trial date was set for the week of February 19, 2024, which was, rather poetically, five years nearly to the day after she had delivered and lost custody of her youngest daughter. The child has been living with her paternal grandmother since she was three days old.

But weeks before the trial was set to start, Smith learned her court date would be pushed for a third time. It is now scheduled for the week of April 22.

“Isn’t everybody due a speedy, fair trial?” Smith told me earlier this month. “This isn’t speedy or fair.”

The latest holdup comes after the Greenville County solicitor’s office entered more than 125 pages of new documentation into discovery. This is called a “document dump,” a legal maneuver in which one side enters hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pages of new documentation within weeks of trial in an effort to overwhelm the opposing side. (This is the second time the prosecution has used this delay tactic. The first was last May when they entered several hundred additional pages of documentation as discovery.)

Despite the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing the right to a fast trial, Stuart Sarratt, a former Greenville County public defender familiar with the Smith case, says, “South Carolina essentially does not have any kind of right to speedy trial.”

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