Do we like Cher?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decades of fundraising, relief donations and animal rescue, held back from the top only by one contested 2019 tweet on immigration and a bit of Twitter temper.
Cherilyn Sarkisian was born in El Centro, California, in 1946, left school at 16 and moved to Los Angeles, where she met Sonny Bono. He got her backup-singing work for Phil Spector, and by 1965 “I Got You, Babe” was a number one. From there it was the CBS variety show, a Best Actress Oscar for Moonstruck in 1988 and the Auto-Tuned monster that was Believe in 1998.
Her recent run has been all victory laps. She guested on Saturday Night Live in December 2025, collected a Grammys lifetime achievement award, and was inducted into the Rock Hall in 2024 with a Dua Lipa duet. The one wobble was at the Grammys, where she presented Record of the Year and first read out “Luther Vandross” before correcting herself to Kendrick Lamar. That's a live-telly slip, not a scandal, and nothing new has turned up on her lately.
On the harm test, the record is strong. In 2020 she headlined a virtual LGBTQ+ fundraiser for Joe Biden's campaign that raised nearly $2 million, where she called Trump “a cruel man who has made our country hate again”. Biden used the night to pledge to make signing the Equality Act a priority. We found no campaigning against trans people or anyone else, and the record on the planet is just as good.
The asterisk is April 2019, when Cher tweeted that she understood helping struggling immigrants but her city, Los Angeles, wasn't taking care of its own. Trump replied that he “finally” agreed with her. Whether you read that as worry about homelessness or as a dig at migrants is where people split, and the CBS report carries no follow-up from her.
She does have a temper online. In March 2020 she posted a furious tweet about the Trump administration's Covid response, deleted it, then said she was “TRULY SORRY”, which is a decent way to cop it. Off the internet, she took Sonny Bono's widow Mary Bono to court over royalties from a 1978 divorce settlement, and in 2024 a judge ruled in her favour, finding the settlement gave her a contractual right to payment.
The good stuff is real. In 2016 she sent 181,440 bottles of water to Flint during the lead contamination crisis. She co-founded the animal charity Free the Wild, helped move Kaavan, the elephant held in captivity in Pakistan, to a sanctuary in Cambodia, and gave the proceeds of her 2020 single to UNICEF. She also took the Kennedy Center Honors in 2018.