From Compton outsider to American nonpareil, she came to embody resistance to toxic norms. But her embrace of GLP-1 drugs feels like capitulation to ideals she once rejected
W
hen Serena Williams was featured in a People magazine story on Thursday morning discussing her 31lb weight loss, the rollout had all the hallmarks of an advertisement draped in the thin veil of an all-caps EXCLUSIVE.
Vogue’s social channels amplified their own access, NBC’s Today show gave her a one-on-one segment and Elle published a carefully packaged interview in which Williams declared she wanted to break the stigma around weight-loss drugs, each of them in lockstep with what appeared to be a hard 9am press embargo. This vintage Jill Smoller quadrafecta was not a spontaneous confessional; it was a coordinated media blitz pegged to the US Open, the tentpole event of American tennis, which kicks off on Sunday in earnest.
Yet for all the precision and polish, it was unmistakably a commercial. The product wasn’t just Williams’s refined physique, already the subject of months-long speculation among her 32 million followers across social media. It was a telehealth service called Ro – a company on whose board her husband, Alexis Ohanian, conveniently sits, a disclosure the press release at least did the courtesy of including in a footnote – promoting access to GLP-1 weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound.
