Our Favorite Beefs of 2024

Rap battles, coordinated internet smear campaigns, photographers with 110-year-old cameras, and geriatric politicians going toe-to-toe to take each other out—this year's beef truly had it all.

By Kylie Cheung  |  December 30, 2024 | 4:42pm
Photo: iStockphoto EntertainmentIn DepthPolitics
Our Favorite Beefs of 2024

If you think your 2024 was deranged, rest assured, you are not alone! 2024, like 2023 and 2022, was a banner year for conflict of all proportions. From chart-topping rap battles and coordinated internet smear campaigns to the shock shooting of a health insurance CEO and geriatric politicians going toe-to-toe to take each other out, this year was beef galore, to put it lightly. Some of it was juicy, some of it was insufferable, and some of it made me lose faith in humanity. But together, all of it brought us here, to the end of the year, and to Jezebel’s Favorite Beefs of 2024™. Or, rather, the beefs that had us seated… I, personally, am a pacifist and wish we could all just get along!!!

Nevertheless, it was an election year (was Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump not, in some ways, the biggest beef of all???), so the gloves were destined to come off, and things were bound to get very ugly. Here is a little recap of just how ugly it all got…

Kendrick vs. Drake

Look, there are brilliant minds who have been chasing the, err, rivalry between Kendrick Lamar and Drake for the last decade, and can give you a lot more insight into what went down with them this year than my little blurb could ever hope to. But, in essence, in March, Kendrick seemed to fire the first shot with a feature on Future and Metro Boomin’s track “Like That,” asserting that he and Drake are not even in the same league as rappers. Drake responded with his own diss track (“Family Matters”); J. Cole briefly joined the fray, then immediately dipped, likely sensing how nuclear Kendrick was about to get; and, come May, Kendrick dropped not one but three tracks (“euphoria,” “meet the grahams,” and “Not Like Us”) in the span of a week—one of which became a song of the summer (“Not Like Us”). 

Each of these tracks came at Drake with a bevy of things most people do not want to be accused of, like having a gambling addiction, fathering a bunch of secret kids, relying on Ozempic and BBLs, and, ah, yes, pedophilia! As Kendrick raps about Drake on “Not Like Us,” “To any bitch that talk to him and they in love / Just make sure you hide your lil’ sister from him.” Nice! Drake responded by putting out a sad little track in which he mumbles on a lifeless beat, “This Epstein angle was the shit I expected,” which is something that innocent people famously say. In November, just when most people had long memory-holed Drake’s public humiliation, he reminded us of it with a lawsuit alleging Kendrick’s label inflated the massive amount of streams that his diss tracks received. Claiming your opponent cheated is also something winners famously do! 

Nancy Pelosi vs. Joe Biden

Biden’s debate performance on June 27 is widely credited with ending his presidential aspirations. But I’d argue this line of thinking gives a man credit for a woman’s work—let’s not erase the whisper campaign heard ‘round the world, all reportedly spearheaded by Nancy Pelosi, to oust Biden from a race he had no chance of winning.

Pelosi, who’s maintained a years-long, close relationship with Biden, said of her decision to take him down, “You have to be willing to throw a punch. For the children,” and has since demurred on whether they’ve repaired their relationship. In October, she said she hadn’t spoken to him since the summer. As for Biden’s perspective, I’ll let his recent call for a ban on congressional stock trading—famously a favorite pastime of Pelosi’s—speak for itself.

Luigi Mangione (allegedly) vs. the health insurance industry

“Beef” is probably a reductive term for, ahem, allegedly getting a gun and shooting the titan of an evil industry you despise, with bullets that say “deny, defend, depose” (insurance industry jargon used to justify denying people life-saving health coverage). But if anything, is Mangione’s alleged targeting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson not the most primordial, old-fashioned kind of beef there is???

Katy Perry’s “Woman’s World” vs. the World

America was divided on a lot this year, but one thing everyone readily agreed on was that Katy Perry’s first single off her latest album, 143, really fucking sucked. “Woman’s World” was the formulaic, platitude-heavy, eardrum-shattering, faux-feminist bop that no one asked for. And if the lyrics, “She’s a sister, she’s a mother / Open your eyes, just look around and you’ll discover,” weren’t bad enough, Perry made it worse with one of the cringiest, most unaware music videos of all time. And when everyone hated the music video, Perry released a “behind-the-scenes” video where she screams “Girlboss shit” and says the whole video was them “being sarcastic with it.” It was bad! (Oh, and, the track was produced by Dr. Luke, the producer Kesha accused of drugging and raping her.)

But you can’t say “Woman’s World” didn’t fight like hell to become the female empowerment anthem of the summer, the decade, and Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign. Blessedly, the people reigned victorious. Perry’s terrible excuse for a song debuted at No. 63 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in July, No. 110 on Spotify’s U.S.-based chart, and No. 58 on the Spotify global chart. And Harris reportedly “politely” declined to use it as her campaign song—not that it mattered, although maybe she would have lost by even more if she used it. We support women supporting women but we do not support women supporting “Woman’s World”…a world that we are very much not living in, by the way. —Lauren Tousignant 

Sydney Sweeney vs. the Manosphere trolls

 

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Earlier this month, Sydney Sweeney sunbathed by a pool, and all of the internet’s most annoying and likely terminally single men refused to be normal about it. Pictures of her looking, IMO, as hot as always—with the added touch of more arm muscle, and from angles where her abs were 2% less visible—went viral, as trolls led by manosphere influencers called her a “catfish” among other horrible insults. Sweeney responded by essentially laughing in their faces, with an Instagram video capturing their worst comments, and no caption. What more could she say, really? All the men commenting on her appearance were telling on themselves by revealing that they’ve never seen a real woman’s body, or a real woman without makeup. Embarrassing for them!

Matt Gaetz vs. Kevin McCarthy (again)

In 2023, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida led a successful coup to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker. A year later, the visceral, well-documented hate between these two burns as strong as ever. In July, they tore into each other on the floor at the Republican National Convention, with Gaetz taunting McCarthy because Gaetz had a speaking spot and McCarthy didn’t. McCarthy went on to give an interview effectively calling Gaetz a pedophile. Classy stuff, gentlemen!

Unsurprisingly, neither of these men is currently employed by the House of Representatives.

Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni vs. the internet 

Over the summer, the press rollout for It Ends With Us was incredibly weird, mostly because none of the cast members—including Blake Lively, Jenny Slate, and Hasan Minhaj—seemed to want anything to do with director and co-star Justin Baldoni. At the same time, everyone else, specifically on social media, seemed to turn on Lively amid a slew of suspiciously timed tabloid reports about her. A range of social media narratives took off, too—about alleged mean girl behavior from Lively (particularly citing a years-old exchange between her and one female journalist while she promoted Woody Allen’s Café Society), and about Lively opportunistically using a movie about domestic violence to promote her hair care brand.

Flash forward to December: Lively filed a lawsuit against Baldoni alleging sexual harassment, a range of misconduct, and an orchestrated smear campaign. My colleague Audra Heinrichs wrote about all of that here. I will say: You can usually tell who the bad guy is based on whoever hires Johnny Depp’s legal or PR teams. Other red flags include men who self-brand as feminist champions and the fact that all the women who interact with him tend to loathe them…

DNC attendees vs. a 110-year-old camera

In August, Jezebel traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. On the second day, a photographer ordered the entire United Center—filled with thousands of attendees—to stay perfectly still so that he could use a 110-year-old camera to take a panoramic picture. And it got really tense! The photographer, who was standing on a raised platform in the middle of the arena, sternly singled out specific people to stop moving, telling one woman to “put your hands down.” People quickly turned on each other, screaming at their former friends, colleagues, and seatmates to “stop moving!” like they were the Game of Thrones townspeople yelling “Shame!” I was standing on the floor and was so stressed out that I didn’t even dare bend my arm in order to take a video of the chaos. —LT

Nicki Minaj vs. Megan Thee Stallion

In January, Megan Thee Stallion topped the charts with “Hiss,” a song that took aim at pretty much everyone who’s cruelly attacked her through the years, since her ex, Tory Lanez, shot her in 2020. One line seemed to allude to Nicki Minaj’s husband, a convicted rapist: “These hoes don’t be mad at Megan / These hoes mad at Megan’s Law,” which is a law that requires information about registered sex offenders to be available to the public. Minaj responded with a slew of deranged tweets and Instagram Lives mocking Megan over her dead mother and her foot injury from being shot, then topped it all off with a god-awful diss track that no one but Minaj’s most diehard fans could bring themselves to stream. Of course, 2024 went on to be one of the biggest years of Megan’s career… all while, in March, Minaj and her husband had to pay a man $500,000 for allegedly assaulting him backstage in Germany.

Olayemi Olurin vs. Eric Adams

Is it really “beef” if one side is thoroughly owned??? In March, New York City’s Eric Adams had the misfortune of stopping by The Breakfast Club at the same time as attorney and political commentator Olayemi Olurin, one of his most vocal and very correct critics. Olurin thoroughly took Adams to task over his right-wing-coded fearmongering about the city’s crime rate in a bid to justify more policing. Olurin particularly raised that, despite Adams’ outsized focus on the death of one NYPD officer, NYPD officers themselves “have killed at least seven people this year” alone. “I’m not going to dismiss the loss of a life of an innocent person that wears a uniform,” Adams said. Olurin replied, “But you do the 31 people that died at Rikers.”

One Rolling Stone journalist called the exchange “the most important interview of Eric Adams in a long, long time.” Within six months, Adams would be indicted on federal charges of fraud and bribery.

Chappell Roan vs. that one photographer

Everyone has been so incredibly rude and weird to the perennially correct Chappell Roan all year, so I’m pretty much always going to be on her side in any conflict. In September, a red carpet photographer seemingly told the singer to “shut the fuck up” for no apparent reason, to which she responded, “You shut the fuck up. … Don’t. Not me, bitch.” Roan confronted the same photographer on a red carpet a month later, telling him, “You were so disrespectful to me. … I deserve an apology for that. Yeah. Yep, you do. No, no, no. You need to apologize,” before one of her representatives walks her back down the carpet. I repeat: Chappell Roan—correct. Everyone else, but especially that photographer—wrong, wrong, wrong!!!

Matty Healy vs. Azealia Banks

Azealia Banks Continues Twitter Fight With Matty Healy With 314-Word Tweet 

Matty Healy and Azealia Banks are famously two of the most, err, off-kilter artists of our generation. So, when they got into it earlier this month over Banks’ comments about the appearances of Healy’s good friend Charli xcx and his fiancé Gabriette Bechtel, I… was afraid! Healy might have been justified to want to defend his friend and his partner, but he quickly lost the moral high ground by threatening to “slap” Banks. Within days of the exchange, Healy deleted his Twitter and Banks hit Healy with a cease-and-desist. I wish I could say something like, “I can’t wait to never have to think about these two people again!!!!” but… let’s be real: Given their highly animated social media presence, there’s just no way that’s true.

Justice Samuel Alito vs. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar

One of the year’s most bitter feuds played out in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court. We all know that Justice Alito is a Fox News crank who hates women and queer people, and things got heated during arguments in three huge cases on those issues. The government’s top litigator, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, argued for the U.S. in cases about abortion pills, abortions in emergency rooms, and gender-affirming care for minors, and she rhetorically handed Alito his ass each time. Prelogar, a former Fulbright Fellow, Harvard Law Review editor, and literal beauty queen, is an expert at seeing through Alito’s “just asking questions” right-wing bullshit and explaining what the law actually says.

In the first abortion case argued this year, regarding the fate of the drug mifepristone, Alito tried to be sneaky when bringing up a dormant law conservatives want to use to ban abortion nationwide: He referred to the Comstock Act not by name, but by statute number, 18 U.S.C. 1461. Prelogar made sure everyone knew that Alito was talking about the law from the Project 20205 playbook. She responded, “I think that the Comstock provisions don’t fall within FDA’s lane.” 

Then during arguments over the availability of emergency abortions for women facing threats to their health, Alito essentially argued for second-class citizenship of pregnant women. He tried to claim that federal law can’t possibly require states like Idaho that ban abortion to offer this care because the words “unborn child” appear in the statute—that is, that a fetus is a person with rights under the law. Prelogar explained that “the duty runs to the individual with the emergency medical condition” and it was wrong to imply that “Congress suggested that the woman herself isn’t an individual, that she doesn’t deserve stabilization.” Alito got very angry that Prelogar would dare point out his fetal personhood argument and snapped back. “Nobody’s suggesting that the woman is not an individual, and she doesn’t…she doesn’t deserve stabilization. Nobody’s suggesting that.” Prelogar calmly responded that Idaho was treating women in that exact fashion. 

Finally, earlier this month, Alito was in peak troll mode during arguments over Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The Biden administration argues the law discriminates on the basis of sex, but Alito said it’s just a medical regulation and pointed to other countries restricting—but not banning—the care. He acted upset that Prelogar didn’t give enough prominence to the U.K.’s notorious Cass Report in the government’s opening brief, saying that she “relegated” it to a footnote. (The National Health Service commissioned the report, published in 2024, which contradicted more than 100 existing studies showing benefits to gender-affirming care for minors.) Prelogar emphasized multiple times that, despite this report, no European country has banned this care “and I think that’s because of the recognition that this care can provide critical, sometimes life-saving, benefits for individuals with severe gender dysphoria.”

It was thrilling to hear Prelogar eviscerate this man with ruthless efficiency all year, but unfortunately, the 6-3 court could still side with the bad guys in each case. And she will no longer be defending people’s rights on behalf of the U.S. Trump has nominated the guy who argued that, unless they were impeached for it, presidents should have criminal immunity for ordering Seal Team Six to assassinate political rivals. —Susan Rinkunas

The Democratic Party vs. Winning

I have never seen two things more at odds with each other than Democrats and winning. Case in point: this year’s election returns. Kamala Harris lost every single swing state to Donald Trump, and she was still the better option than incumbent Joe Biden, who might very well have lost California and/or New York to a man convicted of 34 felonies. All of this is even more frustrating when you consider how the standard party policies—increasing the minimum wage, a right to abortion, union rights, more investments in the social safety net—are exponentially more popular than what Republicans have to offer. Alas, Democrats would rather make Liz Cheney the face of their party and send Bill Clinton to smear Palestinians in Michigan, than say or do anything vaguely popular. And now, we’re all stuck with Donald Trump. Again.

Martha Stewart vs. Andrea Peyser

This was perhaps the most inconsequential beef of 2024, which makes it one of my favorites. In October, Martha Stewart’s documentary, Martha, premiered on Netflix to rave reviews. A lot of the film focuses on Stewart’s 2004 securities fraud trial, which became a tabloid frenzy, and eventually landed her in federal prison for five months. Stewart, herself, had beef with one particular New York Post columnist, Andrea Peyser, who wrote a lot of nasty things about her at the time.

“New York Post lady was there, just looking so smug,” Stewart says of Peyser in the doc. “She had written horrible things during the entire trial. But she is dead now, thank goodness. And nobody has to put up with the crap she was writing all the time.”

Except Peyser is very much alive and still writing horrible takes at the New York Post. One week after the doc premiered, Peyser published a new column with the headline, “I’m alive, bitch!” She continued, “At the time, I rightly noted that Stewart was an “ill-mannered dominatrix,” “the queen of control freaks” and “a dame who made a billion treating her inferiors like pond scum.” Damn. I’d probably convince myself she was dead, too. —LT

 
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