Bad money and bold defiance: When Courtney Love turned down $100,000 for a 20-minute fashion show
If there’s one thing that Courtney Love is always going to do, it’s stand up and speak. Though her legacy is full of odd outbursts and strange moments, there is one fact that can never be doubted: the artist will always use her voice.
For the ultimate example, let’s reflect on 2005. With a mic in front of her on the red carpet of the Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson, Love saw an opportunity and took it. When asked for her ultimate piece of advice for young women in entertainment, she spat out, “If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party in the Four Seasons, don’t go.”
This was over a decade before allegations against the film producer hit an all-time high in 2017. When they eventually did, it’s not at all that Love was out for an ‘I told you so’, but instead, she was simply glad to have said something and potentially protected people, stating she’s “not afraid of anyone in show business”, even though she revealed that the red carpet comment saw her get allegedly blacklisted from Creative Artists Agency.
It’s clear that Love will always be standing up for what she believes in, and back in 2019, she proved it again when she turned down a supposed $100,000 payment that she was offered just to sit at a fashion show. The key is who the invite came from, and the surname they held: Joss Sackler. In 2019, Sackler was about to launch her fashion brand, an easy move for a woman with a family and a net worth of around $11billion. But all that moment is awash with blood.
You might know the Sackler family best from the walls of museums and galleries, as the hyper-rich bloodline has donated a lot to art institutions. You also might know it from the protests so often happening under doorways and arches displaying their name, as the family’s money came from pharmaceuticals, specifically from opioids.
In 1987, the Sacklers launched Purdue Pharma, the company that pushed opioids as a pain medication, even launching a rewards program for their salesmen, pushing them to sell OxyContin. Practically single-handedly, Purdue Pharma is responsible for Oxy launching in America as the family downplayed its incredibly addictive nature. But by 2015, there were 50,000 deaths a year due to the drug, yet by 2017, it had raised the company’s earnings to $35billion.
In 2019, a lawsuit was filed against the family that included 1,600 cases from more than 500 counties in America, all calling for the Sacklers to take responsibility and be punished for the role they played in launching the killer drug. This was around the same time that the invite landed in Love’s inbox – so you know she had something to say.
Sackler had tried to claim that Love was exactly the kind of “strong and undeterred” her brand wanted to speak to. But the irony, and the cruelty, is almost too much to handle when the invite landed barely a year after Love had got clean and sober from an OxyContin addiction. Not only that, but she is famously the widow of a heroin addict who’s live has faced so much trauma exactly because of opioids.
“I am one of the most famous recovering junkies on the planet,” Love Page Six as she turned down the invite with impassioned rage, “What is it about me that says to Joss Sackler, ‘I will sell out to you’?”
