Jessica Alba Used to Hear People in the Industry Blast Jennifer Lopez All the Time
Jennifer Lopez has been dealing with celebrity gossip and attacks from the media ever since she shot to fame. Her contemporary, Jessica Alba, saw some of the mud being slung Lopez’s way earlier in her career. But Alba would’ve bet that some of the negative things people were saying about Lopez, they were also saying about her.
How Jessica Alba reacted to Jennifer Lopez slander
Both Alba and Lopez are used to being looked at under a microscope thanks to their Hollywood stardom. Especially when it came to their bodies. Nowadays, both actors are admired for their physiques. But it wasn’t like that for Lopez in the beginning. In a different time, Lopez was told she wasn’t thin enough.
“They kept telling me to lose weight, and I was a dancer and I was athletic and even my manager at the time, who I no longer work with, was telling me: ‘You need to lose weight, You need to be thinner,’ Lopez told the audience at an event for her television series Shades of Blue on Thursday, according to E! News. “I was like, ‘No I don’t. If I lose any more weight it won’t be me’.”
Even after reaching new heights in her career, the consensus that Lopez needed to lose weight was still alive according to Alba. Back in the 2000s, Alba was especially sensitive to those types of criticisms regarding Lopez’s body. Mainly because the Fantastic Four star knew they were hurling similar insults at her behind her back.
“I got plenty of a**,” Alba once told Rolling Stone (via Campus Circle). “I hear people in the industry talking s*** all the time about how Jennifer Lopez is fat. And I know that if they’re calling her fat, they are saying the same s*** about me.”
But Lopez was glad to see that times have changed a lot since those days. The Hustlers star’s fight to stay true to herself has even served as inspiration for many of her fans.
“It was a fight. It was definitely a fight, and so it’s good to hear that it helped anybody in some way because, at the end of the day, I was just trying to be myself without trying to fit into a mold of what everyone else should be,” she said.
“It’s a different time now you know, which is awesome for me where it is about our differences. It’s about all the diversity,” she added. “It’s just a more accepting time of everything whether it’s body type or race or gender.”
Jessica Alba still doesn’t care what people say about her body
Whereas Lopez has taken a more optimistic approach regarding critiques about her body, Alba has more or less maintained the same attitude. Especially after becoming a mother.
“Who am I now? I give zero f***s. I have three children. They’ve exploded my body, and I’m cool with it. And I know I’m smart. I don’t care what everybody else thinks. I’m good, girl. I’m good,” she wrote in an essay to InStyle (via Life & Style).
But it took a while for Alba to find this newfound attitude of hers. Before she gained a little more experience, the gossip she’d heard used to take its toll.
“By that time I’d been in the [entertainment] business for over a decade, but I was still trying to figure out how to be in the public eye and have ownership over who I was,” she added. “Ninety percent of what people understood about me then came purely from magazine articles, press-tour interviews, and blurbs of gossip.”
