#sdcc 2017

**Disclaimer: I do not endorse the gossip sites and their administrators mentioned in this post, nor do I claim that the information presented here is 100% accurate and confirmed to be such. This post is made up of publicly available information. Sources are linked.**

Part I: Cheating

1. Here are blind items, courtesy of the blog Crazy Days and Nights (CDAN), run by an entertainment lawyer (?) under the nickname “Enty”, from the past couple of years that allege CW has been cheating on Melissa Benoist, his wife of three years, starting not long after the two of them began dating. The latest blind also claims that he was “trying to move onto other people” while still married to her, and even attempting to submit information on himself to gossip sites.

September 2022 (revealed here)

June 2022 (revealed here)

July 2017 (revealed here)

There are others that show that he hasn't been committed to his marriage and that they were likely to get a divorce. 

November 2021 (revealed here - where Enty also had a blind about Melissa potentially coming out in the future)

June 2021 (revealed here)

In case you are doubting how trustworthy Enty and his blind items are- it is a gossip blog, so most definitely not 100%. He has posted blind items before that ended up being verified, while others were never proven to be true.

However, with regards to CW, Enty posted a blind item in late October about the Almost Famous Broadway musical, in which CW appears as Russell Hammond, a main character. Prior to the company’s appearance on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Enty claimed that despite the appearance on late night television, the show wasn’t doing well and would be closing after Christmas. It was then announced December 19, 2022 that the show would close January 8, 2023 (Broadway shows usually close on Sundays). Originally, the musical was advertised to have an open-ended run (which is the norm, unless the show is brought to Broadway explicitly as a limited engagement), so there is a distinction to be made between a show ending its run after a while (like The Phantom of the Opera in the upcoming year) or being closed, mostly due to low attendance and grosses that are not enough to recuperate the money invested (like Almost Famous, K-POP or Ain’t No Mo’ in the most recent cases). Enty’s insider information was correct - it wasn’t public knowledge. So, it could be said that this is another case of “where there is smoke, there is fire”. I cannot claim with full certainty that he has been cheating, but there are many indicators that point towards these rumors being based in fact.

2. He'd dated at least four of his co-stars, all of whom were leading ladies on the “almost network” TV shows he appeared in.

First, there was AnnaSophia Robb, whom he met on the set of the Carrie Diaries. They dated for a while between 2013 and 2014.

Then, he was linked to Nina Dobrev, who led the The Vampire Diaries from 2009 to the end of season 6 in 2015. CW appeared on TVD in season 6 (2014-2015), and there were a number of pictures and claims that the two of them dated. Though, it has recently been confirmed by a former make-up artist on the show during a Reddit AMA that CW’s relationship with Nina was purely PR. 

In 2016, he dated Hanna Mangan Lawrence, his co-star on the series Containment, which was also produced by TVD boss Julie Plec.

And lastly, CW met Melissa on the set of Supergirl. The two started dating in early 2017 and got married in September 2019.

In the video below (which will play an even more significant role in a second), CW said he “was playing hard to get” when offered a role in Supergirl without an audition by then-showrunner Andrew Kreisberg (more on him later). Finally, he did end up taking the role and moving to Vancouver for filming, partly because he apparently knew "he'd meet his future wife and the mother of his children" on the show.

At that time, throughout 2016, he was in a relationship with Hanna. CW’s twitter fans noticed that Hanna moved to Vancouver with Chris around August 2016 before he started filming Supergirl and the two were seen together there some time later, in November 2016, according to Twitter, so about three months into CW’s time filming. They appear to have broken up in December 2016, some two weeks after Hanna’s last post of CW, though the break up was only reported in early January 2017. So CW’s “hunch” about meeting his future spouse occurred when he was in a serious relationship with someone else. Sounds like a nice, faithful guy, right?

Part II: “First and last” 

In 2020, CW was invited to appear on Kevin Smith’s “Fatman Beyond” podcast. As you might know, Kevin (the writer/director of the homophobic movie Chasing Amy) directed multiple episodes of Supergirl, and is good friends with both Melissa and CW. He himself once captioned an Instagram photo with her in 2019 by saying that “[Melissa’s] boyfriend is also [his] boyfriend”, and also posted on IG to congratulate them both on expecting their first child. This proved to be a “lucrative” friendship for CW, as it was Kevin who gave him the voice role of He-Man on Netflix’s animated Masters of the Universe reboot. In the podcast episode, Kevin told an anecdote when him and CW went to see Melissa in her Broadway debut as Carole King on Beautiful in the summer of 2018.

When Kevin emphasized that this performance was, in fact, Melissa’s debut, CW interrupted Kevin to yell that her turn on Broadway was her "first and last". Even Kevin seemed confused for second (at about 42:13), pausing what he was saying to ask, “Is she not gonna do it again?” with genuine interest, at which CW quickly backtracked by saying that he was only kidding.

I get that he was joking, but I think most people would agree that it was a shockingly poor and tasteless joke to randomly throw in there, unprompted. In fact, Kevin told this whole story to highlight how CW was "crying joyful tears" over the fact that his then-girlfriend’s long-held Broadway dreams came true. Why did he feel the need to say this immediately after confirming this was her dream, and one that he apparently shared with her, at that? Yikes.

In that same video, Kevin Smith mentioned that he mispronounced Melissa’s last name for some time as “Benoit”, until CW enlightened him with a joke as to how to correctly pronounce it. Apparently, CW likened the pronunciation of “Benoist” as something that rimes with “moist” (which is true, but he admitted that the joke was of sexual nature at 41:01 of the above video). And while this, too, was an obvious attempt at humor, my impression is that he seemingly has a pattern of making jokes in poor taste about his partner to others, which is definitely not an admirable quality.

Part III: A republican past

Recently, CW was known as a prominent supporter of the Democratic party, most notably tweeting his support for Joe Biden and the Black Lives Matter movement over the course of spring and fall of 2020. 

Apparently, his frequent tweets did not go unnoticed and a person who knew him when he was still in high school in Dublin, Ohio, reached out to the gossip website “Blind Gossip” to tell a story about CW’s affiliation back when he was younger. The resulting blind item from 2020 was perhaps the most shocking piece of information I discovered while doing this deep down. Essentially, it claims that CW used to be "super conservative" and alleged that he and his friend routinely stole dozens of lawn signs supporting John Kerry, the democratic presidential candidate running to unseat incumbent president George W. Bush in 2004. The person who spoke to Blind Gossip claimed to have seen the stolen signs in CW’s car. Obviously, the theft of yard signs is a crime. So if this is true, a 16 year-old CW was not only a thief, but also a passionate supporter of George W. Bush. With regards to Bush, I don’t have to detail while he was a terrible president guilty of war crimes - if you are not entirely aware of his catastrophic tenure, you are welcome to google it and read through thousand pieces of evidence that will make clear why supprting should be condemned.

At this point, I have to make it clear that there is no further evidence to corroborate this story other than a person's submission who has seen the stolen signs and to whom he confessed the theft. As I said with CDAN, the trustworthiness of gossip sites is questionable at best. Nevertheless, the blind is eerily specific, and the theft of lawn signs is definitely not uncommon in Ohio or the U.S. in general during presidential elections, so this very well could have happened. But we will likely never know for sure.

 Part IV: Performative activism

In spite of his youthful days of Bush-inspired theft, CW is a very vocal Democrat now. Yes, I know that people can grow and mature, and they can very well change their political affiliation over time, but I guess not everyone becomes a passionate democrat after stealing to benefit the GOP years before. Maybe the more liberal ways of Los Angeles genuinely rubbed off on him, or maybe his change of heart was merely motivated by the wish to be perceived as progressive in order to fit into Hollywood. Who knows the truth in his case?

1. Anti-racism

During the 2020 George Floyd protests, he actively advocated for the Black Lives Matter movement (which is great), tweeting his support quite frequently. He even called out and shamed others that posted literally anything else, like the publication Variety for continuing to report entertainment news like they always do (though merely a few months before, in mid-February, when reports of the pandemic had already surfaced and COVID-19 was rapidly spreading outside of China, he was more than happy to repost the news that featured him from these entertainment sites).

He also filmed himself calling representatives, posted an open letter to the president of Elon University (his alma mater), and took photos of himself holding books on the topic.

I wholeheartedly support BLM and anyone who seeks to proactively fight against systemic racism in the US and elsewhere. Except, CW posted a couple of weird tweets that were really not helpful. There were some in particular that clearly centered himself instead of BIPOC voices in an attempt to celebrate his own wokeness, like this one tweet where he gleefully patted himself on the back for tweeting the phrase “Black Lives Matter” 4 years prior.

Since then, he doesn't post about anti-racism and BLM anymore. To be fair, he rarely posts anything other than updates on his career, but he has also become very silent when it comes to activism, even with respect to his own mental health awareness campaign. That makes it seem like he wasn't actually committed to unlearning his racial bias, raising awareness against police brutality as well as white supremacy, and campaigning for Black liberation and equal justice. As others have pointed out before, he probably only spoke up at a time when he thought calling out injustice would benefit his image and only followed suit when he saw hundreds of famous people participate in the outrage sparked by George Floyd’s murder.

And the reason why his self-congratulatory attitude in 2020 rubbed me the wrong way was precisely this: he never seemed to committed to actually doing the work of becoming actively anti-racist, and instead lauded himself for being woke years prior to the events of 2020, even though he himself posted this tweet when the protests first started following Floyd’s death:

This first tweet from that time makes two things very clear: one, that he was absolutely not “woke” when it comes to racism, because otherwise, he wouldn’t have tweeted something like “I can’t believe this is happening” when speaking about police brutality against Black people. If he was, in fact, as woke as he claims in 2016, he wouldn’t have said something like this in 2020. Those who actually educated themselves on systemic racism were, though enraged and disappointed, probably not surprised by another instance of the violent policing of BIPOC in the US - it is an incredibly sad truth that such deplorable acts of violence happen every single day, but of course he doesn’t know that, because he is a white man that is afforded the extreme privilege of ignoring the everyday realities of being BIPOC in the US. Him saying “we shold have moved on from this hate by now” only shows how blind he was to the institutional and permanent nature of racial injustice in his own country.

Second, his rage is nothing but performative. He only speaks up about such topics when he can establish himself as a champion of social justice, but between these highly publicized and scrutinized incidents of racialized violence, he is most definitely not doing anything to unlearn his own biases or to actively participate in these conversations.

2. Condemning Mon-el’s misogyny

Then there's also him describing his sexist, slave-owning Supergirl character as a “puppy” in November 2016 (photo credit goes to @/avvatrice on Twitter) and then again at the infamous 2017 San Diego Comic Con (SDCC), insisting that he may have some less than savory views but doesn’t mean any harm or malice. Said character was not only a former slaver and a raging misogynyst, but he also turned out to be Supergirl producer Andrew Kreisberg's self-insert. Yuck.

Only after Kreisberg was fired in November 2017 and the details of his sexual misconduct were published, did CW write a little twitter essay fully acknowledging that his character, who was given lines that matched Kreisberg's own sexist, disturbing words and views in real life, was a misogynistic, small-minded piece of sh*t.

Photo credit goes @/avvatrice on Twitter.

To be clear, I do not blame CW for the abysmal way his character was written, that’s fully the writers’ fault. But I do blame him for downplaying and romanticizing the character’s unsavory, disgusting qualities for over a year, attempting to portray a sexist, lying white man who fled a planet full of slaves as a harmless “puppy”.

3. Homophobia

In June 2019, CW's mental health awareness campaign IDONTMIND (IDM) released two t-shirts for pride month. So let's see some of his past with the LGBTQ community.

To start with, this is in line with what many companies and campaigns routenely do when Pride month comes around every year, a practice called “rainbow washing”. This refers to cases when organizations “disingenuously use Pride branding for their own gain or to give themselves a deceptive air of liberalism and allyship”. Technically, IDM is a non-profit, and all profits of the campaign support their umbrella organization, Mental Health America (MHA), which qualifies as a 501(c)(3) organization in the US. CW himself was appointed to the board of directors of MHA in 2019, departing from this role in 2021. Nevertheless, the practice of rainbow washing is not solely reserved to for-profit corporations, as it is not just about aiming to bring in more money from those sales, but also about creating the impression that the organization is, in fact, accepting and welcoming towards all orientation and lifesytles.

The reason why IDM’s efforts to raise money for MHA (and the Trevor Project, according to their now-deleted IG post back then) is noteworthy here as a potential example of rainbow washing, is the history of its founder with the LGBTQ community, which the collection was meant to support. A history which is not exempt from allegations of homophobia.

First of all, there is a video CW made with his friend best friend and IDM co-founder Edward Schmit that taps into harmful stereotypes and is centered around mocking gay men. The whole skit is about two men having a pillow talk, speaking in a manner often dubbed as “gay voice” as a way to caricature gay men. Straight men mockingly imitating this speech is not just overtly homophobic, but is also a subtle type of misogyny, since it’s making fun of someone who is “sounding feminine”. They perpetuate the myth that whenever a man has qualities that are traditionally assigned as “feminine”, they must be gay and simply not “manly” enough.

There's also this compilation of him essentially doing the same in different settings, for roles and skits. How he approaches the topic of homosexuality and portrays queer men shows how he doesn’t shy away from tapping into these stereotypes instead of seeking to portray such characters as anything other than mere caricatures that are nothing but comic relief.

And then let’s not forget SDCC 2017 and the cast’s (Melissa, CW, Mehcad, Jeremy, David, Odette, Katie) infamous singing interview, where some of them, notably including Jeremy Jordan and CW, outright mocked the fans for shipping Supercorp.

When asked about Supercorp in the same interview, Katie McGrath defended the fans (at 7:15 of the video):

The great thing about what we do is, like any art, anyone can read into it what they want.

Upon hearing this, CW immediately felt the need to chime in and practically mocked Katie’s comment (at 7:38):

Sexuality is all about others’ perceptions of yours, right? That was sarcasm!

While Katie sought to validate fan’s feelings and interpretations of the show, CW’s facial expressions throughout the entire time they were speaking about Supercorp and his subsequent comment reek not just of some misplaced arrogance that his character wasn’t the hit he thought it would be, but also of the homophobia he wasn’t able to hide away. It’s clear he felt threatened by the incredible response to Kara and Lena’s storyline that massively overshadowed Kara’s forced and problematic relationship with CW character. It is also evident that the fact that many people saw a romantic connections between two, supposedly straight female characters, really bothered him - after all, it was “Karamel” that was supposed to be in the limelight, while any romantic undertones between Kara and Lena were unplanned. CW’s character was brought to the show with the purpose of becoming the lead’s romantic interest, but instead, many fans fell in love with the chemistry between Supergirl and Lena Luthor. To him, it must have been disappointing to lose the attention he thought he would get to a queer ship, leading to this obviously homophobic comment at SDCC.

Interestingly, in January 2020, when it was announced Jeremy Jordan would return for a few episodes in season 5, a fan asked Jeremy whether his character Winn and CW’s since-departed former slaver “were married” in the future. In response to the people who were seeimingly shipping his character with Jeremy’s, CW tweeted this:

His response, particularly the quip “chemistry=too strong”, makes me think that he was either similarly sarcastic here about people shipping two supposedly straight, same-sex characters as he was back at SDCC, or, he was suddenly okay with the fans doing this if it was his character they were shipping and getting the spotlight from the viewers.

Overall, as these examples show, CW’s attitude towards the LGBTQ community is contentious at best. So it was understandably suspect when IDM released Pride merch a mere two years after the SDCC disaster. CW was all too happy to participate in the bashing of queer fans during that San Diego interview, and this attempt to appear supportive of the community was meant to absolve him from and make people forget about his history of belittling LGBTQ people, which he has never acknowledged, while presenting him as a benevolent ally with a charity that fully supports everyone under the rainbow umbrella.

Part V: Work ethic

Most recently, CW starred as Russell Hammond in the musical adaptation of the 2000 film, Almost Famous (AF). Russell is one of the three lead characters, and since CW was the most senior and well-known from the three performers playing those roles, he has been the one to receive top billing most times (even though Anika Larsen, a Tony-nominee, and Drew Gehling were in the cast, too, both of whom have more Broadway credits as well as name recognition in theatre circles and also play principal roles in the musical). In the beginning, he was all over the musical’s social media pages, too, though more recently, he has been featured less and less, and there was even an instance when on a cast photo, they tagged his understudy, Van Hughes, instead of CW, even though he was the one in the picture (the tag was later removed, and then CW was tagged in it).

This could have easily been an oversight on the part of whoever is running AF’s Instagram, but, as some have pointed out, they could have possibly shaded CW for skipping out too many shows, most notably also the one on the day that photo was posted. By my count, he missed about 18-19 shows - and most of these during the week before the company was scheduled for a nationwide televised performance.

In a SiriusXM interview with Casey Likes (the recording of which I can’t find for the life of me), CW explained that he doesn’t have a lot of memories from opening night, which is still more than what he can recollect from the final preview from the evening before, as he was on heavy medication. Apparently, he had been sick for the last few previews before the company’s performance on The Tonight Show, for which he did show up (and ended up getting a lot of negative buzz for butchering the only line in the song he had). One fan account of his, formerly @/chriswoodnetwork on IG (notorious for cropping Melissa out of every picture, generally ignoring her and posting throwbacks with his former girlfriends), claimed at that time that he was on vocal rest, which is in line with what he said himself.

However, those approx. five performances before the Fallon appearance and opening night weren’t the only times he was out for. According to the twitter accounts @/BroadwayCovers and his understudy, Van Hughes, he missed an additional 7-8 performances in November, particularly five in a row before coming back for the company’s appearence on CBS’ Good Morning America on December 1. He was also absent at least four-five more times in December.

These are the CDAN blinds that discuss how unreliable he has proven himself to be as a lead member of a Broadway company that claim that his absences should be attributed to his lack of commitment and questionable work ethic:

December 26, 2022

December 22, 2022 (revealed here)

December 8, 2022 (revealed here)

November 29, 2022 (revealed here)

What’s more is that it is highly likely he got this role thanks to the connections of his wife (though this, once again, cannot be fully verified). One the one hand, in the SiriusXM interview, he mentioned that after Colin Donnell, who played Russell during the musical’s San Diego run, had to bow out of the production due to scheduling conflicts, he joined a company for a workshop and did not have to do an actual audition for the part. On Twitter, @/PotionClass (here on tumblr @magicpotionclass​) pointed out that one of the producers of AF was also the one to invite Melissa to lead Beautiful on Broadway back in 2018, and that the musical’s writer (and the original film’s director), Cameron Crowe, is repped by the same agency as Melissa.

While I believe he was in fact sick prior to opening night, the subsequent absences either prove that he is simply unfit to do eight shows a week on Broadway or confirm Enty’s claim that he only wants the fame (which is why he never misses a TV appearence) without the hard work.

Part VI: Standing up for victims of abuse?

One other point of criticism that has been brought up against CW recently is him working with people who are connected to Bl*ke Jenner (BJ), Melissa’s first husband who abused her both physically and verbally, causing permanent damage to her eye by throwing a phone in her face. In this regard, I generally say that actors don’t always have the luxury of picking who they do and don’t want to work with - Melissa herself is currently working on a show produced by Julie Plec, who was accused of racism, treating Black actors and their characters badly, and maintaining an evident racial bias in the production of her shows; while Katie McGrath’s new series, The Continental, will star Mel Gibson, a known antisemite and abuser. So, I was gonna go easy on CW for working with Daniel Sovich on AF. Sovich, an actor/musician, and member of AF’s company is good friends with BJ. Working with him is not CW’s fault, because he clearly wasn’t the one who brought Sovich to the musical and there is only little evidence that they are even friendly.

However, I recently discovered that it was Robert J. Ulrich who served as casting director for the Thirtysomething sequel pilot in early 2020, in which CW was cast in a leading role (though the project was never picked up). It is therefore likely that CW was cast in that role by Ulrich himself at a time when he was already married to Melissa and BJ’s abuse was made public by her. As these pictures show, Ulrich is a good friend of both BJ and Sovich.

Additionally, it was also revealed that he is working with Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B Entertainment, on the development a feature film. It is well-known that Pitt was accused of abusing his former wife, Angelina Jolie, and their children. Particularly in this case, I believe it would be more than possible for CW to try to work on this feature with any other producer who is not a violent domestic abuser.

That makes it a total of three times in the past three years that he’s worked with either people directly connected to the man who abused his wife, or someone who has been accused of doing so with their own family. To be honest, these three instances make me question his support of his wife in the wake of her speaking out, as well as his public commitment to stand up against the abuse of women and

...”not work with those who continue to build toxic work environments.”

That particular comment did not age well.

Part VII: IDONTMIND making mistakes

1. Anxiety

Lastly, I want to mention two more things in relation to CW’s campaign, IDM. In the fall of 2020, IDM launched a new collection titled “Anxiety - Own Your Feelings”. The items in the collection (two sweatshirts, two baseball hats and a tee) were made with the graphic “anxiety” printed with an elegant, cursive font.

The collection immediately received backlash for romanticizing mental illness and using it as an aesthetic/fashion statement to sell merchandise. After even mental health professionals commented to state how harmful and foolish this idea was, IDONTMIND posted the following statement in the comments:

As you can see, they did not apologize for putting out such a collection and essentially attributed the backlash to a matter of opinion and taste. Needless to say, they went on with the launch of these products and sold them as planned, even if they were discounted some weeks later. After the above statement was posted, CW himself seemed to respond to the backlash with this (since deleted) vague “notes app” post on Instagram that did not take any accountability whatsoever or apologize for offending many people, instead trying to tell them they should just forgive him and IDM for the blunder:

Clearly, neither CW nor any of the team behind IDM was concerned with the whole incident, since they chose to sell the collection anyway instead of admitting their mistake and pulling these products.

2. Run IDONTMIND & TWLOHA

The second thing I wanted to include concerns IDM’s Run IDONTMIND program that they launched in May 2021. May is Mental Health Awareness Month in the U.S. and the program aims to encourage people to run a 5k, 10k or half marathon during those 31 days in order to raise money for IDM and their work in mental health awareness. That sounds like a cool thing, right?

Well, the problem is that they basically stole this idea from another mental health organization, To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA - if you’ve never heard of them, please check out this amazing non-profit!), a charity founded by Jamie Tworkowski in 2006. Curiously enough, TWLOHA was created sixteen years ago when Tworkowski designed a shirt which he sold in order to allow a friend to get the mental health care she needed. TWLOHA grew from here into a well-known charity that aims to spread a message of hope and help to people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicidal thoughts. Since their inception, they tried to raise money and awareness by selling shirts and later other types of merchandise that look unique enough to jumpstart everyday conversations about the meaning behind them - over ten years before CW founded IDM with the exact same “business model”.

In 2013, TWLOHA launched the annual event “Run For It 5k”. Every spring, they designate a day when the followers of the movement can complete a 5k to raise awareness for TWLOHA’s work. Prior to the event, TWLOHA usually sells a t-shirt with that year’s graphic and a finisher’s medal, among other things.

Besides Run IDM being an eerily similar initiative, in 2022, IDM even started selling shirts and medals just like TWLOHA always does (though TWLOHA’s medal comes for free if you buy the shirt for $30, while IDM originally sold it separately for an additional $20).

In many ways, IDM seems to be copying TWLOHA - their Journal also bears a lot of similarity to TWLOHA’s blog; they share the same business model, and now IDM is organizing essentially the same events.

Back in 2017, in an interview with TVInsider.com about his new campaign, CW was asked how he came up with the concept of this initiative, to which he said:

“...Then this fell into my lap, this little pocket of stigma awareness surrounding mental health that I felt wasn’t being approached in a way that I felt would be the most successful.”

...”because people wear shirts that say nothing phrases all the time, and by having a meaning behind it, the hope is that something simple like “Hey, I like your shirt, what does it mean?” people can then say “Oh, it’s actually a mental health awareness campaign.” And now we’re having a conversation, now we’re talking about mental health, which is the whole thing is that everyone’s terrified to open up about.”

In this interview, he presents IDM as a brand new idea to fight the stigma surrounding mental health awareness, a topic that he, in his own words, sought to approach “in a way that would be the most successful”. Needless to say, other campaigns with the exact same approach, like TWLOHA, already existed for years before he ever launched his own campaign. So, despite what he said in this interview, his idea was nothing revolutionary and only copied what other organizations while already doing. This doesn’t mean IDM is not doing good work and helping people, but CW definitely should not claim that he was the one who came with the idea to defeat the stigma by selling shirts that spark conversations about mental health.

Part VIII: The rest

There certainly are more rumors and topics to discuss than these, however, I found some of them on forums and blogs as they were mentioned by fans, so I chose not to include them unless I could find other sources for such claims.