There was a time when Chanen Johnson could say, “I’m making more money than an NFL player,” referring to her husband, New Orleans Saints tight end Juwan Johnson.
While she has fun bragging about that now, that wasn’t always the case. At first, she was conflicted about how much she wanted to share with the world. But after growing exasperated with the amount of hate she and other women who are in relationships with professional athletes were receiving — being called gold diggers, among the more polite invectives, and accused of being spoiled while their husbands paid all the bills — she finally decided to set the record straight.
“I was initially pretty scared to share that this was actually profitable for me,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter of her social media career. “But I was getting so angry that people were saying I didn’t have a job.” Just in case the haters weren’t aware, Chanen absolutely has a job — one that involves creating content for her nearly 4 million followers across multiple platforms.
Chanen is among a new generation of wives and girlfriends of pro athletes, aka WAGs, who have proudly reclaimed the once-demeaning term. The acronym first appeared in British tabloids in the early 2000s to refer to English soccer players’ partners, such as Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole. The collective term lumped these women together, robbing them of individuality and reducing them to merely decorative fixtures of Premier League broadcasts while erasing their individual accomplishments.
