Do we like them?

Do we like Marc Anthony?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent record, real charity and a clear stand for Puerto Rico, with one settled wage dispute and a fairly thin record on LGBTQ+ topics.

Marc Anthony was born Marco Antonio Muñiz in New York in 1968 to Puerto Rican parents. He started as a session backing vocalist for freestyle and house acts, even working with Menudo. His big turn came in 1993, when he went Spanish-language with the album Otra Nota and found the salsa sound that made him a star.

The Beckham stoush is the fresh bit. Reports said he called Victoria Beckham to the stage at Brooklyn Beckham's wedding, which got tangled up in the family rift. Anthony told The Hollywood Reporter he had nothing to say about the family's dispute and called it “extremely unfortunate”, adding that how it's been portrayed is “hardly the truth”. That's a bloke caught in other people's drama, not a scandal of his own.

The one legal blot is a wage fight. In 2019 a former housekeeper sued, alleging he owed her more than $500,000 in back wages for 80-hour weeks. Anthony denied it and said her timesheets were inflated. The pair settled in private mediation, with the terms undisclosed, so nobody has proven anything either way, but it's the single mark on the good-person side.

On the harm check, the record is clean as far as we could find. We found no anti-LGBTQ+, anti-woman or anti-migrant words from him, and nothing on climate either way. We also found nothing about the company he keeps that raised a flag. Honestly, that's a gap rather than a gold star: he has never been much of a culture-war talker, so we can't say he's been a loud ally.

What he has been loud about is Puerto Rico. After Hurricane Maria in 2017 he told Trump to stop banging on about the NFL and help the island, saying “We are American citizens too”. In 2020 he fronted a Lincoln Project ad urging Puerto Ricans to “vote him out”. That's his own public, on-the-record politics, and it's aimed at neglect of an American territory, not at any group.

The good stuff is real. He co-founded the Maestro Cares Foundation in 2012 to help disadvantaged children in Latin America, with a residence and school in the Dominican Republic and a larger centre planned for Barranquilla in Colombia. After Maria, he, Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez raised more than $35 million for relief, including a benefit concert.