‘Billboard’ Kills PETA Ad Aimed at J-Lo

MinkI’ve always thought Jennifer Lopez was a better actor than she gets credit for. She’s an accomplished pop singer from the Paula Abdul school – and I don’t care about her personal life – but she’s lost big points with her efforts to popularize fur in fashion. It isn’t retro-street glam, J-Lo – it’s disgusting. Not surprisingly, the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has taken a similar position. They created a website – www.jlodown.com – about the issue, as well as a print ad that shows a gruesome photo of a skinned animal (which I have but will not post; let’s just say the photo above could be labeled “Before”) next to a letter to Lopez, attacking her for using fur in her Sweetface clothing line. Now PETA is accusing Lopez and her record company of bullying the NY-based record-industry trade magazine Billboard into removing the ad from a recent issue.

The music magazine had agreed to run PETA’s advert…[but] Billboard cancelled the $5,000 [ad], leading PETA Vice President Lisa Lange to conclude that the magazine “caved to pressure” from Lopez’s record label, Sony Corp’s Epic Records, and Lopez’ publicist Nanci Ryder of Baker-Winoukur-Ryder.

Ryder admits, “I’m doing my job, which is protecting my client. I don’t understand why PETA want[s] to meet with Jennifer. “In my opinion, there would be nothing worse than a meeting, unless in the meeting we could commit to not wearing fur and not using fur in fashion. Unless we could do that, I didn’t quite understand where the meeting would go.”

However, LA-based radio industry trade paper Radio & Records opted to run the PETA ad in its April 8, 2005, issue.