Do we like Carrie Fisher?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful in her own words, a documented stand for a friend and a humanist award, but the record we could open is thin.
Carrie Fisher is Princess Leia to most of the world, and she was a writer and stage performer who turned her own messy life into comedy. Her Hollywood Walk of Fame star landed in 2023, on Star Wars Day, near where the original film premiered in 1977. It sits beside her co-stars Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill. She died in 2016.
On the LGBTQ+ front, the record we could open is jokey rather than political. In 2010 she told an Australian talk show she could 'turn men gay', while promoting her HBO-filmed show Wishful Drinking. The Advocate ran it as lighthearted. It's a gag in a gay publication's pages, not a campaign, and we found nothing hostile to LGBTQ+ people from her.
The harm check comes up clean. We found nothing from her on vaccines, climate or migrants, and no work with people who push harm. The nearest thing to a blemish is a 2016 tweet. Asked whether Donald Trump's debate sniffles were cocaine, she replied 'I'm an expert & ABSOLUTELY', then told Vulture she didn't think so and put it down to nerves. That's a cheap shot she took back.
The best story about her character is secondhand but a ripper. A friend told a radio station that Fisher delivered a cow tongue in a Tiffany box to a producer the friend accused of harassment. The note warned him off touching her friend 'or any other woman again'. It's the friend's account, not a court finding, and the producer was never named.
In 2016 Harvard's Humanist Hub gave her its Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism. In accepting it she stressed how much community matters. For a woman who was famous for being blunt about her own life, that fits the pattern of someone who used her platform for other people.
So where do we land? Both tests pass, but the sources we could open are thin, which is why this isn't a ten. She comes across as sharp, kind to her mates and on the right side of the things this page cares about. If you grew up on Leia, you can keep loving her.