Do we like Dua Lipa?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Years of public support for LGBTQ+ people and refugees, real charity work, and one contested position on the Middle East.
Dua Lipa was born in London in 1995 to Kosovar Albanian parents who fled Pristina in 1992 and settled in London as refugees. The family went back to Kosovo in 2006, when she was 11. At 15 she moved back to London on her own to chase a music career, and she's now a Grammy winner with a Time 100 spot.
The contested bit is the Middle East. In 2021 a full-page New York Times ad from Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's World Values Network accused her of antisemitism over her support for Palestinians. She rejected the allegations on Twitter and said she stands “in solidarity with all oppressed people”. Where you land depends on whether you read her posts as human-rights advocacy or as one-sided, and that's your call.
The 2025 Glastonbury row was messier. The Daily Mail reported she had fired agent David Levy after he signed a letter urging Glastonbury to drop Kneecap. She and WME called that “completely false” and “categorically false”. She did say she doesn't condone the actions of Levy or other executives toward an artist speaking their truth, so she took a side without confirming a sacking.
Fresh this year, Lipa is the plaintiff, not the defendant. She sued Samsung in May 2026, alleging it used a copyrighted backstage photo on TV packaging and kept going after cease-and-desist notices. Samsung hadn't commented in the reports we saw, and the case is still allegations, so we're not calling it either way.
The good stuff is real. With her father she set up the Sunny Hill Foundation to help young people in Kosovo, and the Biography profile lists her support for refugee and immigrant rights, women's rights and LGBTQ+ rights. In March 2026 her Service95 platform backed a London charity event that paid for a pickup truck for a Ukrainian medical battalion.
We found nothing in her words or in who she works with that would make us wince. The record is clean on the stuff we care about, with one Gaza position that some people cop more flak over than others. That's why she lands at an eight and not a ten: it's thin on faults, not packed with them.