Apparently inspired by Jennifer Aniston’s recent viral essay about tabloid pregnancy rumours, Renee has penned her own strongly worded riposte to her negative press.
Renee, 47, begins her Huffington Post response by directly referencing a recent Variety story titled, Renee Zellweger: if she no longer looks like herself, has she become a different actress?”
“I am not writing today because I have been publicly bullied or because the value of my work has been questioned by a critic whose ideal physical representation of a fictional character originated 16 years ago, over which he feels ownership, I no longer meet,” Renee writes in her blog titled We Can Do Better.
“I am not writing in protest to the repellent suggestion that the value of a person and her professional contributions are somehow diminished if she presumably caves to societal pressures about appearance, and must qualify her personal choices in a public court of opinion.
“I’m not writing because I believe it’s an individual’s right to make decisions about his or her body for whatever reason without judgment.”
Instead, Renee says she decided to engage with the rumours because of the way in which “tabloid speculations” had become “the subject of mainstream news reporting”.
“The ‘eye surgery’ tabloid story itself did not matter, but it became the catalyst for my inclusion in subsequent legitimate news stories about self-acceptance and women succumbing to social pressure to look and age a certain way,” she wrote.
In the Huffington Post piece, Renee strongly denies altering her eyes through plastic surgery.
“Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I did not make a decision to alter my face and have surgery on my eyes,” she writes.
She went on to lament the level of media attention such rumours receive.
“It increasingly takes air time away from the countless significant unprecedented current events affecting our world,” she says.
“It saturates our culture, perpetuates unkind and unwise double standards, lowers the level of social and political discourse, standardises cruelty as a cultural norm, and inundates people with information that does not matter.”
The latest rumours about Renee’s appearance surfaced after the new trailer for Bridget Jones’s Baby was released. The film opens in Australia on September 15.
