I was delighted when a snap of me & Rihanna went viral – then she was accused of FAT-SHAMING me
A WOMAN revealed how she met Rihanna as a child – only for it to become a meme.
After than things got even weirder for Sammi Smith, now 21, when members of the public turned on the international star, currently pregnant with her first child, for allegedly FAT-SHAMING her.
Sammi, 21, from the USA, met Rihanna after a concert in Madison Square Gardens, New York, when she won a competition.
She attended with her mum and bought Rihanna her favourite chocolate bar, a Snickers.
Rihanna posed with Sammi, holding the bar and that should have been that.
Until years later, when Sammi was in high school, she suddenly started getting a lot of messages.
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It was because a viral meme account had picked up on the picture and quoted (as a somewhat cruel joke): “I met Rihanna and she took my Snickers away from me & said ‘you don’t need this fatty’.”
Unfortunately many people believed Rihanna had actually body-shamed Sammi.
They commented on Sammi’s social media accounts about this.
“I can’t believe she did this,” one person said.
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“Throwing away her poster for sure.”
Sammi recalled the incident on her YouTube video channel.
“I smiled but inside I was screaming,” said Sammi, on learning the meme had been made.
And she was keen to clarify Rihanna did not fat-shame her.
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“While this is funny, it’s not true. That seems obvious to me but a lot of people still ask me if it is.”
She said: “It was my freshman year of high school and it was the night before the first day of finals [exams].”
“I was trying to study and I’d put my phone away and I was struggling so much to focus.”I could hear my phone buzzing and buzzing and buzzing and [I thought] I’m not that popular, like people don’t text me and constantly text me and call me.”
So I decided to take two seconds to check my phone and make sure everyone’s alive.
“I opened it to all these texts and people were tagging me in things on and I had no idea what is going on.
“I went on Instagram to find out that the picture that I had taken with Rihanna had been made into a meme.
“I hadn’t seen this picture since I met her because I was young and I didn’t have Instagram or any social media.”I think I’d printed it out and brought it into school to show my friends but I didn’t have a phone or computer.
“I kind of forgot the picture existed.”