Title: “Alyssa Milano’s Super Bowl Attendance Draws Public Ire”
In what could be considered a baffling example of celebrity privilege clashing with the myriad economic struggles faced by everyday Americans, Alyssa Milano, a renowned 51-year-old actress and activist, has drawn sharp public scorn. This criticism arises from her attendance at Super Bowl LVIII, which poses a contradiction to her recent solicitation of public assistance to fund her son’s baseball team trip to Cooperstown.
On Sunday, Milano posted a photo on her Instagram account, depicting her and her son observing the match from packed stands at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. The thrill of Kansas City Chiefs’ 25-22 overtime victory against the San Francisco 49ers aside, what truly struck a discordant note with her audience was the ostensible contradiction between her current opulence and recent requests for donations.
Page Six highlighted the fact that Super Bowl tickets are famously prohibitive in price, with the stalls Milano occupied being price-tagged at a staggering $2000 a seat. The fallacy acknowledging such exorbitance while asking less financially-endowed fans to donate to a relatively innocuous cause was not lost on her followers.
OutKick’s Clay Travis posted a tart comment decrying Milano’s actions, “[Alyssa Milano] could afford Super Bowl tickets which cost an average of $10k each, but needed (much poorer) people on Twitter to pay for her son’s team’s Cooperstown, NY little league trip. Tony Danza would never.”
A further inquiry echoed by several individuals was along this line of thought – if Milano could afford this luxurious Super Bowl outing, why couldn’t she bear the expense of her son’s baseball team trip? Why did this celebrity, with her better-than-average means, resort to a public fundraiser?
Recounting the events leading to this furore, last month Milano, created a GoFundMe page under her married name. Soliciting contributions from her millions of followers, the page promisingly sought funding for her son’s baseball team’s trip to Cooperstown, NY. The request drew attention, not because of its novelty, but because of the stark conflict that it presented when juxtaposed with Milano’s celebrity status and presumed affluence. Terms like “gross” and “tone-deaf” were bandied around in criticisms levied against her.
Milano did attempt to address these allegations, justifying her actions by highlighting a commonality among parents who frequently raise money for their child’s sports teams through GoFundMe. She shared that she would love to pay for her son’s entire baseball team and their families’ expenses for this colossal trip but maintains that she can not afford to do so, concluding with the hopeful promise of maybe someday.
This incident, at its core, seeks to cast a spotlight on the glaring disparities evident in society today. Celebrities are not immune to oversights, and the public doesn’t hesitate to hold them accountable. Milano’s effort to resort to crowd-funding for her son’s trip, while understandable from a parental perspective, seems baldly inappropriate when she willingly splurges thousands of dollars on a sporting extravaganza. The question, thus, is one of priorities and disparities. In light of escalating socio-economic disparities and the widening chasm between the haves and the have-nots, Milano’s Super Bowl outing ranks as seriously ill-judged in the court of public opinion.
