Do we like Tina Turner?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Decades of standing with LGBTQ+ people and speaking up for abuse survivors, with no harmful words of her own turning up, and only a petty lawsuit against a tribute act to mark it.
Anna Mae Bullock grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee, and became Tina Turner in the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, a 1960s and 70s powerhouse with hits like “Proud Mary”. By the late 1970s her career looked finished and she was working the cabaret circuit. Then rock stars helped haul her back, and 1984's Private Dancer sold more than eight million copies and won four Grammys.
The big story is the one she told herself. According to her memoir, Ike Turner began hitting her in the mid-1950s and it got worse, and he later admitted to People in 1990 that he had been abusive. In July 1976 she walked out of a Dallas hotel with a Mobil credit card and 36 cents, days before a tour. She said he wanted to control her, “economically and psychologically”, so she could never leave.
On the harm test she's about as clean as it gets. She led the opening ceremony of the first Gay Games in San Francisco in 1982, when many other artists stayed away, and in 2000 told The Advocate that same-sex marriage was a “wonderful thing”. I couldn't find anything from her on trans rights, climate or vaccines, so we won't put words in her mouth. PolitiFact also rated a viral claim that she'd thanked Donald Trump as having no evidence behind it.
On the good-person side, she was among the first celebrities to talk openly about domestic abuse, and survivors' workers still credit her for it. In the HBO documentary she spoke about shame, and she later talked about forgiveness as letting go rather than letting him back in. She's no saint on the legal front: she sued a German tribute act over posters she said looked too much like her, won in Cologne, then lost on appeal. That's a petty stoush rather than a pattern.
Her Buddhism was central. She chanted for decades, and told Lion's Roar that since practising she didn't experience the feeling of guilt anymore. Faith never fails anyone here, and hers pointed her at calm and kindness rather than culture war.
The recent news is posthumous business and bronze. In March 2026 Pophouse, the Swedish company co-founded by ABBA's Björn Ulvaeus, bought her likeness rights and most of her catalogue from BMG. Its CEO would not confirm a digital avatar and said plans would come within six months. The statue unveiled in Brownsville in 2025 was widely mocked online, which says more about the sculpture than about her.