Plagiarism and Love Letters
Nick Viall is a celebrity best known for his multitude of appearances on reality TV shows including Dancing with the Stars, two seasons of The Bachelorette and one as the star of The Bachelor. More recently, he’s been working on his podcast, the Viall Files and enjoying time with his girlfriend, Natalie Joy.
Earlier this week, Viall celebrated his birthday and Joy posted a photo of the couple on her Instagram to help commemorate the day.
However, it wasn’t the photo that ended up attracting the most attention. Instead, it was her caption.
Sharp-eyed readers noticed that the caption was eerily similar to two other birthday captions. This was most prominently called out by Twitter user @PooCrumbly, who shared this photo comparison.
In short, the caption was largely taken from two separate images, both by YouTuber Claudia Sulewski, who was sharing similar birthday posts about her partner, Finneas.
Though the story hasn’t exactly become mainstream news, it’s received coverage in celebrity circles and has some fans of the celebrities involved wanting the issue to be addressed.
However, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Neither Joy nor Sulewski have spoken on it. The only one who has is Finneas, who retweeted the original tweet, adding only “HAHAHAHAHA LMAOO” and tagging Sulewski.
As of this writing, Joy’s Instagram post is still up with the copied caption intact.
But, while the dispute itself is little more than a minor scrape between celebrities, it actually calls back to a long history of plagiarized love letters.
Why It’s So Common
When we look at the reasons that students commit plagiarism, one of the main causes that comes up is fear. Students, often afraid that their work is not good enough to get the grade that they need, will sometimes turn to plagiarism or other shortcuts.
However, it’s not just students that experience fear of inadequate writing. There are many situations in one’s life where there is immense pressure to communicate one’s thoughts well or, potentially, face consequences. Whether it is a job application, a difficult letter to a friend or, in this case, a birthday caption to a loved one.
The pressure of finding “just the right thing to day” often leads people to commit plagiarism. We’ve even seen high-ranking officials at universities fall into this trap as they seek out ways to give difficult news to students and faculty during the pandemic.
While it’s impossible to know exactly how common plagiarized love letters are, it’s a well-known trope in literature. Known as Playing Cyrano, the trope of having others write romantic thoughts on your behalf dates back to at least the 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. However, it almost certainly goes back much farther back than that.
In short, Joy is far from the first person to have copied and pasted a love letter from somewhere else. What has changed is the internet and the rise of social media.
The Role of Social Media
For most of our history, love letters and words of affection were private matters, usually only heard or read by the parties involved. One never had to worry about what those outside the relationship thought about them.
However, with the rise of social media, love letters are very public things. We are not just expressing our feelings toward our loved ones, but to the entire world.
This greatly ramps up the pressure. Finding the right thing to say to express your feelings is hard enough when just one person is involved. However, now the whole world is an audience. For celebrities like Joy, who has nearly 100,000 Instagram followers, this can be especially challenging.
However, this also makes it much easier to spot plagiarism and more likely it will be detected. Now that such letters are public, they come under much greater scrutiny and, when you combine that with the fascination with celebrities, it’s easy to see how stories like this one can happen.
To be clear, none of this is to excuse plagiarism. Joy should not have copied those posts, even if she did feel that the words were perfect, and instead should have spoken from her heart. Ultimately, it is better to be imperfect and genuine, than it is to be a perfect plagiarist.
However, this does explain why situations like Joy’s will likely be a recurring phenomenon moving forward. Celebrities are still human and, when humans respond to inhuman pressure, they often don’t do very well.
That’s something that’s true for everyone.
Bottom Line
Though I don’t think Joy’s actions should be forgiven or forgotten, they should be contextualized. Furthermore, it’s important to remember that, even though it was a public post, it’s still first and foremost an issue for Joy and Viall to resolve between them.
Ultimately, they’ll decide what, if any, fallout there should be. Though Sulewski was the one plagiarized, a lawsuit is highly unlikely and fans, if they are even aware of the story, aren’t likely to stop being interested in the couple because of it.
In the end, this is a reminder that, when people are unsure of what to say or afraid of saying the wrong thing, the temptation of plagiarism will be there. For those feeling that temptation, it’s a reminder of why you don’t give into it, especially when your work will be seen by the public.
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