Do we like Doja Cat?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Old slur and chatroom controversies and a 2023 shirt row sit against a Red Cross fundraiser, and no campaign against any group turned up.
Doja Cat broke through in 2018 with the viral cow-themed rap “Mooo!”, and her pop-rap run turned her into a proper arena act. In 2022 she and SZA won the Grammy for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for “Kiss Me More”. She is a big name with a big back catalogue, and that catalogue carries some baggage.
The first stoush came right after “Mooo!” took off. Old use of a homophobic slur surfaced, she defended herself on Twitter, then deleted the post after actress Debra Messing criticised her. A day later she apologised, said she had used the words “out of ignorance”, and promised to do better.
In May 2020 Hollywood Unlocked posted a video that allegedly showed her in online chat rooms with an alt-right group, and her 2015 song with a racial slur in the title resurfaced. She denied taking part in racist conversations, apologised for being on some of those sites, and called the song a bad decision. Take her word as her word, but the denial and the apology both sit on the record.
In October 2023 she posted, then deleted, a selfie in a shirt featuring comedian Sam Hyde, who has alt-right links and donated to the Daily Stormer in 2017, per NBC. She later reposted a cropped version, and NBC reported she hadn't addressed the backlash. Around the same time she told fans to “get a job” and fell out with parts of her fandom, which tells you more about her temper than her politics.
On the harm check: nothing turned up of her campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and I found nothing on vaccines or climate either way. The marks against her are a slur she apologised for in 2018, an alleged chatroom link she denied in 2020 and one dodgy shirt. We also found no pattern of working with people who push harm, though that part of the record is thin.
The recent stuff is more cringe than harmful. In March 2026 she dunked on Timothée Chalamet over his opera and ballet comments, then walked it back in a follow-up TikTok, calling her own take “virtue signaling”. In June she posted insults at Elon Musk while begging for X's audio posts to return, which was never going to work. A bit much, but it's online spats, not a worldview.