Copied and pasted from another article. Well said:
On the night of the assault, Cheryl Tweedy was already wasted - on vodka and Red Bull, wine and complimentary champagne - when she staggered down to the ladies' lavatories. There sat 38-year-old Sophie Amogbokpa, a black lavatory attendant, who earned a paltry £25 a night with which she funded her part-time law degree. In the course of a dispute - during which Miss Amogbokpa requested that Tweedy pay up for the sweets she had snatched - an energised Tweedy punched her very hard in the eye. In the pictures, Amogbokpa looked as if she had been horribly mugged: she suffered pain for weeks.
Tweedy was charged with both racially-aggravated assault and simple assault. The former hinged on whether she had called Miss Amogbokpa "a fucking bitch" as a witness claimed, or "a fucking black bitch" as Miss Amogbokpa subsequently claimed. The jury decided that there was not enough evidence that Tweedy's assault was prompted by racism rather than uncomplicated viciousness, and so convicted her of plain assault. The judge called it "an unpleasant piece of drunken violence" for which Tweedy had shown "no remorse whatsoever". Well, that's it, I assumed, Tweedy will now get the sack.
She didn't: instead, the record bosses at Polydor breathed a collective sigh of relief that the racism charge was overturned, and a spokesman blithely announced that: "Cheryl's position in Girls Aloud is not affected." A few days later, Tweedy was prancing around on Top of the Pops. The personalised message to fans on her website reads: "thank U so much 4 everything. I really appreciate it: loadsa love hugs and kisses" - rather as though she had just been through some terrible kidnapping ordeal that was no fault of her own.
Had Tweedy been convicted of racially-aggravated assault, Polydor was preparing to eject her from the band. Racism is to the music world what extramarital sex was to John Major's government: to insult Miss Amogbokpa as a black woman would have been career suicide. Even the white rapper Eminem - known at the beginning of his career for the reckless vitriol that he poured upon women and gay men - was smart enough to steer clear of lyrics attacking black people. If he hadn't, he would still be stuck in his trailer park, eating his Mom's spaghetti.
To punch Miss Amogbokpa simply because she was a human being trying to do a thankless job properly, however, appears to pose no public relations problem at all. The all-powerful machine that grinds out "celebrity" can even absorb such a brutish little incident and use it to garnish the perpetrator's lucrative "bad-girl" image.
If pressed, apologists for Tweedy hint that such bad behaviour "is what pop stars do". It isn't, actually. There is a clear difference between drinking and drugging oneself to self-destruction - the traditional hobbies of the off-duty rock star, however senseless - and physically attacking someone who has done you no harm. Even blind rages are rarely blind of self-interest: it is worth noting that Tweedy hasn't yet thumped her boss at Polydor, or even the manager of the VIP lounge at The Drink. She chose to vent her drunken fury on the humble lavatory attendant, someone she considered of little account.
What will be even more disturbing is if Britain's teenagers buy this nonsense. Teenagers are very keen on fairness: they are wont to cry over homelessness and furry animals caught in traps. Yet sometimes unfairness is extremely close to home, and it doesn't get much more glaring than a freshly-minted pop star assuming she has the right to skip down from the VIP area and rough up an older woman who is working for £25 a night.
The loutishness of Cheryl Tweedy - and what the music industry's indifference to it says about the power of celebrity - should repel us. But the most shocking thing of all is how few people seem to be in the least bothered by it.