Stella Lefty is Getting Hate Over Her Dad, Noah Kahan, The Chicks and Now Olivia Rodrigo - and It’s Gone Too Far

Stella Lefty just secured another week at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘Boston’, a viral earworm that is cementing itself as one of the break-out hits of the year. If it wasn't for Ella Langley's record-breaking run at No. 1 with ‘Choosin‘ Texas’, Lefty would no doubt be in the midle of her own lengthy spell atop the prestigious chart.

With the momentum still strong behind ‘Boston’, Lefty releasing her debut album, Long Way Home, last month, and the CMA Awards nominees being unveiled next week, the conversation should be heating up as to whether Lefty is the New Artist of the Year.

Instead of celebrating Lefty's rise, though, we continue to be bombarded with comment after comment, headline after headline and video after video dragging the Illinois native.

When Lefty first broke onto the scene with January's ‘Thinking ‘bout You’, most of the criticism stemmed from the revelation that her father, Eric Lefkovsky, is the founder of Groupon and a multi-billionaire. This led to similar angles of attack to those faced by Gracie Abrams - daughter of JJ Abrams and Katie McGrath - with many social media users blasting Lefty for coming from a world of privilege. Ever since, Lefty's Instagram and TikTok comments sections have been flooded with accusations that her father must have paid her way to the top of the charts.

But after that, swathes of online commentators and followers seem to be looking for any possible means of undermining Lefty's popularity. There's the whole discussion around ‘Boston’ listing Noah Kahan as a songwriter, due to Kahan's team flagging similarities to ‘Stick Season’, and then the more recent instance where ‘Summer You Were Mine’ interpolates elements of The Chicks’ ‘There's Your Trouble’.

On the Kahan situation, Lefty revealed to Vanity Fair, “When I was writing the song, I wasn’t thinking about Noah Kahan. I was literally thinking about nothing at all...I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes, so I’m like, if this sounds like that, whatever, all good”. This led to more flak, courtesy of Lefty coming across as ‘belittling’ the similarity.

On The Chicks, there was a furore around the idea that ‘Summer You Were Mine’ didn't initially credit the ‘Goodbye Earl’ hitmakers, but their names were later added. Rolling Stone then confirmed that they were always credited, and their absence from the official credits on platforms like Apple Music was simply a temporary mistake.

And then, there was the video that resurfaced online of Lefty saying “f*** you” to Olivia Rodrigo, as part of a clip showing her allegiance to Sabrina Carpenter during Rodrigo and Carpenter's very public feud. This was, bear in mind, from 2022, and Lefty added context in a recent comment, “i was a stupid teenager posting random things on social media. i love olivia and never meant anything harmful by that”.

The “nepo-baby” narrative is an inevitability, as we saw with artists like Abrams and Lana Del Rey, and the only way to truly silence the doubters is to prove yourself through enough album cycles. It's still a part of the conversation with each new Abrams release, but it's certainly less of a thorn in her side compared to a couple of years ago.

Similarly, the ‘Stick Season’ and ‘Summer You Were Mine’ incidents seem to simply be the result of the modern music landscape, where a lawsuit is lurking around the corner whenever a song becomes a hit. We've seen countless artists be retrospectively sued or credited on songs that sound a little similar, so Lefty's team are simply being smart in including both Kahan and The Chicks to avoid any fallout.

The Rodrigo video, though, is where it becomes clear that TikTok trolls have cultivated some kind of vendetta against Lefty. It's an old clip, first of all, and it was shared during a time when everyone and their dog was wading into the Rodrigo vs Carpenter rivalry. It's purely an example of a young Carpenter fan showing her support via an idle social media clip, without there being any real ill-will towards Rodrigo.

This has all come together to create a truly nasty online environment for Lefty. Every single clip she posts of her singing along to a new song is met with a torrent of abusive and denigrating comments. Many zero in on the songwriting credits given to Kahan and The Chicks, donning her ‘Stella Thefty’, while others stick to the “nepo-baby” line, dismissing each new milestone as another paid-for gift from “daddy” and another piece of proof that she is an industry-plant. It's also hard to ignore the worrying number of comments using Lefty's Jewish heritage as an insult.

At the start, you could perhaps dismiss the criticism as mere skepticism towards a new artist because of Lefty's father, and then the ‘Boston’ and ‘Stick Season’ likeness.

But now, the entire conversation has devolved into something unnecessarily personal and deeply vitriolic. At the end of the day, Lefty cannot control who her father is, and any father whose child was trying to make it in the music industry would of course want to give them any boost or advantage that they feasibly could.

And as for the similarities between ‘Boston’ and ‘Stick Season’, you'd struggle to find any song in the Billboard Hot 100 Top Ten that isn't at least partly reminiscent of another.

We've now reached a breaking-point, because this debate is no longer taking place in an angry, hate-filled comments section, it's bleeding into professional music commentary. There are countless videos popping up of critics and influencers waded into the discussion, and while some of these are thankfully defending Lefty against this onslaught, the vast majority are only feeding into the echo chamber. In doing so, they are legitimising what ultimately feels like a hate campaign.

The arrival of Long Way Home was supposed to be the cherry on top of an immensely successful year, where Lefty has risen from obscurity into a fixture on the Billboard Hot 100.

And that is hopefully how Lefty and her team have treated it, with the early streaming numbers looking impressive and a number of high-profile tour-dates lined up for 2027.

But unfortunately, Lefty's response to the Rodrigo debacle hints that she does see a lot of the online backlash that floods her comments. Aside from the troubling but unsurprising fact that most of the high-profile instances of artists being called “nepo-babies” in recent years have been young women, like Abrams and Lana Del Rey, there is the matter of Lefty being a 24-year-old human being. And while people may try to excuse it as just part and parcel of life in the public eye, nobody deserves the relentless barrage of abuse that Lefty is receiving.