Wild reason this pic angered football fans
Felicity Hayward, 37, was Britain's 'OG plus sized model' after being discovered by photographer Miles Aldridge in 2011. Recently, the influencer and activist shared a snap with Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice after attending an event for the football club and Adidas.
'Finishing a very fun day with the third kit house party with Declan Rice & @adidasuk,' Hayward captioned the images of the duo smiling arm in arm.
As a huge Arsenal fan, Hayward accepted the opportunity of a meet and greet that was being offered at the event and had her picture taken with Rice. She shared it to Instagram and within 12 hours it had gone viral for 'all the wrong reasons'.
Hayward said it culminated in the worst trolling she has ever experienced throughout her 14-year career as a model and content creator.
One man posted this comment: 'Model girlfriends and wives and my boy Decs is stuck with this. I feel for you my boy. Know your worth and leave no one is gonna blame you.'
Another said: 'Looks like his type … loves a fridge.'
Hayward was understandably stunned at the vitriol aimed at her, just like Rice's long term partner Lauren Fryer has experienced. Fryer, who has been with Rice since they were teenagers and have a three-year-old together, ended up having to delete her social media accounts in April last year due to continuous abuse about her appearance and claims Rice could 'do better'.
'There are hundreds of comments about my appearance and my weight — 95 per cent of them are utterly disgusting and they're coming from full grown men,' Hayward said.
She said the horrific trolls have wrongly made the assumption 'using their last brain cell' that she is Rice's partner Lauren Fryer.
'Now, Lauren is absolutely gorgeous and the issue isn't that people are suggesting I am her. It's about the fact that whether it is me or her in the image, they're using this opportunity to try and drag a woman down for her appearance,' she said.
'It's no wonder she left social media due to the amount of abuse that she got in the last couple of years.'
Hayward said football is supposed to be about community, and if men aren't complaining about how women look they are complaining about England's Lionesses — the female football team — winning the UEFA Women's EURO 2025 final.
'I am not Declan Rice's girlfriend. There is nothing wrong with my weight, or his long term partner Lauren's,' she said.
'Just keep your mouth shut babe.'
The abuse of Rice's actual partner Fryer appeared to begin in December 2023, when Rice was told that he 'could do better'. After five months of constant trolling, Fryer eventually wiped every photo from her account that boasted 70,000 followers. Love Island star Liberty Poole stepped in to defend Fryer, who is Rice's biggest supporter.
'I think she's beautiful this is crazy,' Poole wrote.
'What happened to celebrating different body types and embracing how we are all individually made.
'Beauty standards these days are unrealistic and everyone's gone mad because of social media.
'I'm going to keep preaching about it till I die. Time for change, this can't continue.'
These gross comments aren't solely a Premiere League problem. Earlier this year, North Melbourne AFL Player Toby Pink married his childhood sweetheart Chloe after eight years together.
However, when the newly married Mrs Pink shared her wedding photos, the comments were frankly vile.
The comments on a celebratory article about their nuptials became about Mrs Pink's weight, to the point that AI summarised that the response was about 'beauty standards' rather than their wedding day.
It feels important to point out that the comments weren't just critical of Mrs Pink's weight. They were cruel, degrading and hateful. And they were appearing faster than anyone could delete them, or possibly manage the situation.
Someone called her a 'fridge,' another wrote, 'AFL player by day, pig hunter by night,' and one comment claimed she looked more like an AFL player than a bride.
It left the 25-year-old human resources worker in a flood of tears, as she is not a public figure in any capacity, except for the fact that it turned out the man she fell in love with was decent at kicking a ball. It wasn't the first time Mrs Pink had faced some of these comments. She'd received similar slurs after attending AFL's night of nights, the Brownlows. This was just a whole new level.
Mrs Pink, who is between a size 14 and 16, which is the average size of an Aussie woman, said perhaps the saddest part of the response to her wedding photos is that it was one of the few times she posted something online and didn't feel insecure about her weight.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
News.com.au
12 hours ago
- News.com.au
Wild reason this pic angered football fans
A plus sized model has hit back following the worst trolling experience of her life, after being mistaken for the girlfriend of a popular English soccer player. Felicity Hayward, 37, was Britain's 'OG plus sized model' after being discovered by photographer Miles Aldridge in 2011. Recently, the influencer and activist shared a snap with Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice after attending an event for the football club and Adidas. 'Finishing a very fun day with the third kit house party with Declan Rice & @adidasuk,' Hayward captioned the images of the duo smiling arm in arm. As a huge Arsenal fan, Hayward accepted the opportunity of a meet and greet that was being offered at the event and had her picture taken with Rice. She shared it to Instagram and within 12 hours it had gone viral for 'all the wrong reasons'. Hayward said it culminated in the worst trolling she has ever experienced throughout her 14-year career as a model and content creator. One man posted this comment: 'Model girlfriends and wives and my boy Decs is stuck with this. I feel for you my boy. Know your worth and leave no one is gonna blame you.' Another said: 'Looks like his type … loves a fridge.' Hayward was understandably stunned at the vitriol aimed at her, just like Rice's long term partner Lauren Fryer has experienced. Fryer, who has been with Rice since they were teenagers and have a three-year-old together, ended up having to delete her social media accounts in April last year due to continuous abuse about her appearance and claims Rice could 'do better'. 'There are hundreds of comments about my appearance and my weight — 95 per cent of them are utterly disgusting and they're coming from full grown men,' Hayward said. She said the horrific trolls have wrongly made the assumption 'using their last brain cell' that she is Rice's partner Lauren Fryer. 'Now, Lauren is absolutely gorgeous and the issue isn't that people are suggesting I am her. It's about the fact that whether it is me or her in the image, they're using this opportunity to try and drag a woman down for her appearance,' she said. 'It's no wonder she left social media due to the amount of abuse that she got in the last couple of years.' Hayward said football is supposed to be about community, and if men aren't complaining about how women look they are complaining about England's Lionesses — the female football team — winning the UEFA Women's EURO 2025 final. 'I am not Declan Rice's girlfriend. There is nothing wrong with my weight, or his long term partner Lauren's,' she said. 'Just keep your mouth shut babe.' The abuse of Rice's actual partner Fryer appeared to begin in December 2023, when Rice was told that he 'could do better'. After five months of constant trolling, Fryer eventually wiped every photo from her account that boasted 70,000 followers. Love Island star Liberty Poole stepped in to defend Fryer, who is Rice's biggest supporter. 'I think she's beautiful this is crazy,' Poole wrote. 'What happened to celebrating different body types and embracing how we are all individually made. 'Beauty standards these days are unrealistic and everyone's gone mad because of social media. 'I'm going to keep preaching about it till I die. Time for change, this can't continue.' These gross comments aren't solely a Premiere League problem. Earlier this year, North Melbourne AFL Player Toby Pink married his childhood sweetheart Chloe after eight years together. However, when the newly married Mrs Pink shared her wedding photos, the comments were frankly vile. The comments on a celebratory article about their nuptials became about Mrs Pink's weight, to the point that AI summarised that the response was about 'beauty standards' rather than their wedding day. It feels important to point out that the comments weren't just critical of Mrs Pink's weight. They were cruel, degrading and hateful. And they were appearing faster than anyone could delete them, or possibly manage the situation. Someone called her a 'fridge,' another wrote, 'AFL player by day, pig hunter by night,' and one comment claimed she looked more like an AFL player than a bride. It left the 25-year-old human resources worker in a flood of tears, as she is not a public figure in any capacity, except for the fact that it turned out the man she fell in love with was decent at kicking a ball. It wasn't the first time Mrs Pink had faced some of these comments. She'd received similar slurs after attending AFL's night of nights, the Brownlows. This was just a whole new level. Mrs Pink, who is between a size 14 and 16, which is the average size of an Aussie woman, said perhaps the saddest part of the response to her wedding photos is that it was one of the few times she posted something online and didn't feel insecure about her weight.
News.com.au
20 hours ago
- News.com.au
Marvel turns it back on US, eyes global locations
Marvel Studios has shifted most of its production out of Georgia in favour of the United Kingdom — a move that has gutted the Peach State's film industry, wiping out nearly half its spending and leaving once-bustling soundstages largely empty. The Disney-owned studio behind Spider-Man: Homecoming and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law filmed nearly two dozen projects in Atlanta over the past decade. But starting with this summer's Fantastic Four: First Steps, Marvel is shifting its superhero slate — including two new Avengers films and the next Spider-Man — to facilities outside London. While major studios including Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery threatened boycotts over Georgia's 2019 abortion law, with some smaller productions leaving in protest, Marvel's current exodus to the UK is driven purely by economics. Rising labour costs in Georgia tipped the scales. In the UK, crews are paid less and studios aren't saddled with health insurance expenses, making it cheaper to shoot overseas, a person familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal. The result has been devastating. Georgia's film and TV spending has plunged nearly 50 per cent in three years, with just 245 projects filmed in the fiscal year ending June 2025 — down from 412 in 2022. 'You feel like a jilted lover,' Janine Gosselin, 62, a script supervisor who once made $200,000 ($A308,000) a year working Marvel sets, told the Journal. She hasn't had steady work since February 2024 and has borrowed from her retirement fund to cover bills. The downturn has film workers so demoralised they've turned the state's famous jingle into a joke. Crew members on the game show 25 Words or Less sang new lyrics to the Made in Georgia tag earlier this year: Unemployed in Georgia. Trilith Studios — Marvel's longtime 1,000-acre production hub near Atlanta, with 34 stages and its own housing village — has gone quiet after years of non-stop demand. 'We were fighting over stages daily because there just wasn't enough room for Marvel and whatever other show was trying to film,' location scout Lenzi Sealy, who worked on four Marvel projects, told the Journal. Now, she says, the lot is 'largely empty.' Sealy remembered February's Captain America: Brave New World shoot, when rumours spread it might be Marvel's Georgia swan song. Her fears came true weeks later when the studio held an auction to sell props it had accumulated during its decade in the state. 'That's when it really hit home,' she told the Journal. For local crews, Marvel wasn't just another client — it was the cornerstone. The studio's high-budget blockbusters employed hundreds at a time and kept workers busy year-round. 'Marvel allowed me to do so much with my life and really set the trajectory for my career,' said grip John Grubb, 44, who worked six Marvel films. He even calls his $350,000 home ($A539,000) 'the house 'Avengers' bought.' The collapse comes after a meteoric rise that began in 2008, when Georgia expanded of its film tax credit to 30 per cent, uncapped — making it one of the most generous in the world. The policy turned Atlanta into the so-called 'Hollywood of the South.' Franchises rushed in: Lionsgate's Hunger Games, Universal's Fast & Furious, Netflix's Stranger Things and AMC's The Walking Dead. At its peak, the industry supported nearly 20,000 jobs, according to a 2023 Georgia State University study. But the global economics have changed. Across the US, 29 per cent fewer big-budget movies and shows began filming in 2024 compared to 2022, according to ProdPro. In the UK, that number jumped 16 per cent. New Jersey and Texas are pumping up their own incentives to compete. Lee Thomas, director of the Georgia Film Office, said rising labour costs drove Marvel and others out. 'We hope that this is an anomaly where they'll try out other markets and will return to Georgia because they have faith in our crew and facilities and our tried-and-true incentive,' she told the Journal. Trilith CEO Frank Patterson is betting the slump will end, predicting a 'new normal in 2027.' In the meantime, his company is investing in start-ups that make content exclusively on the studio's stages.
News.com.au
20 hours ago
- News.com.au
Alleged four-work remark at Meghan and Harry's wedding revealed
For decades and decades, a staple of royal news reporting rounds was the Prince Philip Gaffe. Once, twice a year, the indomitable Duke of Edinburgh would be shunted off to make small talk with Strathclyde youth workers or to barrack for Britain somewhere that didn't broadcast The Archers and of his trademark 'quips' would come. Blunt, rude, insensitive, cheeky or just a bit racist, he did all sorts. And so here we are today, more than four years after his death and the duke's very forthright way with words has put him back in the news, after a new book revealed the four words he said after Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex's 2018 wedding. Not 'Where's the bloody bar?' or 'I want cake now' or 'What's a Suits star?' Rather the Duke of Edinburgh allegedly offered a brusque assessment of the nuptials that does not sound glowing. Grant Harrold worked as a butler for (then) Prince Charles for seven years, from 2004 to 2011, while his partner Jack Stooks was a gardener at Highgrove, Charles' country estate. In 2018, Stooks, still working at Highgrove, was invited to watch the Sussex wedding from the small lawn directly in front of St George's Chapel, taking Harrold with him. In Harrold's new memoir The Royal Butler, as per the Telegraph, he writes: 'We watched as the happy couple, and then the other members of the Royal family, filed out of the chapel. When Prince Philip came out he turned to the Queen and said, 'Thank f--- that's over.'' This line now joins the list of instances of Harry's grandparents not exactly brimming to the brim with familial glee over the union. Philip allegedly gave Meghan a cutting nickname, allegedly referring to her as 'D.o.W.' - The Duchess of Windsor aka Wallis Simpson - after 'he detected her apparent similarity to Wallis', according to veteran royal biographer Ingrid Seward. Ahead of their wedding, the Duke of Edinburgh was 'wary' of the former Suits star's 'charm offensive,' Seward in My Mother And I. 'While the Queen continued to champion Harry's new love, he warned his wife to be cautious. It was uncanny, he told her, how much Meghan reminded him of the Duchess of Windsor.' Harry's friends were also amongst the doubters. In Tom Bower's 2022 Revenge he recounts the shooting weekend where the duke introduced his then-girlfriend to his school friends. Afterwards the old Etonians allegedly messaged one another, 'OMG what about HER?' said 'Harry must be f***ing nuts.' By the time the Sussexes' wedding rolled around in May 2018, Queen Elizabeth had allegedly grown concerned about the match. In June this, conversations she had right before the Sussexes' big day with one of her closest confidants, her cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson, were revealed by biographer Sally Bedell Smith on her Substack. (Lady Elizabeth died in 2020.) Only two weeks before the wedding Lady Elizabeth said: 'The Number One Lady — I call her Jemima — says the jury is out on whether she likes Meghan. My Jemima is very worried. 'We hope but don't quite think she is in love. We think she engineered it all.' Even once Harry and Meghan were wed, the scepticism didn't stop. In 2019, writer Sophia Money-Coutts (daughter of the 9th Lord Latymer of the Coutts banking empire) revealed that 'a very senior member of the royal family' had been calling the Duchess of Sussex 'the degree wife, because she'll only last three years'. Clearly all the naysayers were wrong. This year Harry and Meghan marked their seventh wedding anniversary and the duchess' Instagram account regularly features lovey-dovey, oooey-gooey posts about 'Aitch' and their sunshine-and-roses life in California. However, what is clear is that after the great rupture of Megxit and the Sussexes' initial couple of years of professional twinning, doing a one-off Spotify special, launching their Archewell Foundation, and making the six-part Harry & Meghan attached at the proverbial hip, since 2023 their careers have split off from one another. Meghan has been setting herself up as a lifestyle entrepreneur, the doomed American Riviera Orchard morphing into the successful As Ever and with the second series of her Netflix show With Love Meghan set to debut later this month. She's been making wine and spreads and waves and doing podcasts and there is a Christmas special in the pipeline. However, Harry has cut something of a more lonely figure, having resigned (along with his co-founder and the board) from Sentebale, the charity he co-founded with Lesotho's Prince Seeiso, earlier this year over a falling out with the organisation's chairman. The recent announcement that the Sussexes have secured a new but reduced deal with Netflix largely seemed like primarily a win for the duchess, with her putting out the statement and the duke having no solo projects of his own. The mind positively boggles thinking about what Philip would make of Sussexes circa 2025 if he were still alive, let alone the very concept of flower sprinkles. I think we can definitively say he never once spent a single second thinking about how he could 'show up lovingly', as Meghan says in the new With Love trailer, nor did he ever consider the spiritual uplift of the decorative ice cube. Less than three years after the Sussexes' wedding, the royal family returned to St George's Chapel for his funeral, only weeks after the duke and duchess' paint-peeling Oprah Winfrey interview. Harry flew back to farewell his grandfather, while Meghan, seven months pregnant, was 8,500 km away at home at doctor's orders. According to Tom Bower's Revenge, Harry's remaining grandparent made her own blunt call, allegedly saying to aides, 'Thank goodness Meghan is not coming'. You have to wonder if, for the duchess having just laid out in painful detail her experiences of bias and of a callous disregard for her wellbeing, the feeling might just have been mutual.
