Thanks to her famous father, Chelsea Clinton has been a celebrity since she was young. That kind of fame has opened many doors for her that would otherwise have remained closed. However, it has also meant that the young woman has spent nearly her entire life in various tabloid headlines.
Now, more and more of those headlines are speculating that Bill Clinton’s daughter has had plastic surgery. Who is keeping these rumors alive, and what has Chelsea said about them? Keep reading to discover everything you need to know!
A troubling childhood thanks to her appearance
The nature of most plastic surgery rumors comes down to people suspecting that a famous person looks a little too good. It’s the ultimate backhanded compliment, really…a way of saying that you think someone looks good now but that they looked much uglier before.
Chelsea Clinton has been enduring plastic surgery rumors since 2015 (more on this later), but this speculation is likely activating a trauma that goes all the way back to her childhood. While Chelsea’s dad was president, she was constantly in the public eye as a frizzy, gangly teenager. She ended plenty of criticism over her appearance.
As reported by the Daily Camera, the young Clinton once said, “When my dad ran for president, I was made fun of a lot, generally for my appearance.” Continuing, she said, “I had frizzy hair. I wore glasses sometimes and I had braces. It was quite mean and quite vicious.”
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Plastic surgery speculation begins
In other words, Chelsea Clinton has dealt with people speculating about her appearance for most of her life. The earliest plastic surgery rumors go back to the early 2000s, though nobody was ever able to conclusively prove that Clinton had work done.
In retrospect, there wasn’t really much driving those old headlines outside of the fact that readers were morbidly curious about what the Clintons were up to after moving out of the White House. Poor Chelsea got caught in the crossfire back then, and she wouldn’t be back in anyone’s crosshairs for another decade and a half.
Strange conspiracy theories from a stranger man
The most recent round of rumors dates to 2015 and mostly comes from one source: Roger Stone, the conservative Trump ally known for telling tall tales. That was the year that Stone told the National Enquirer a conspiracy theory about Chelsea getting plastic surgery to hide the identity of her real father. He claimed that “The resemblance between Chelsea and Webb Hubbell is uncanny. Chelsea underwent plastic surgery not to look better but to conceal Hubbell is her REAL dad!”
It’s a truly wild claim, and one that (as Media Matters reports) Stone would repeat in 2016. There, he claims that Chelsea is “actually the daughter of Webb Hubbell and Hillary Clinton” and repeated the claim that the woman was using surgery to downplay the resemblance. “What 18-year-old gets plastic surgery unless you’re trying to, I don’t know, thin out the lips and make you look less like your daddy.”
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Speaking up about the plastic surgery rumors
Chelsea Clinton never responded to Roger Stone’s crazy claims. However, she did once speak up about the plastic surgery rumors on Twitter after a conservative critic Janie Johnson claimed that Chelsea had chin surgery.
Taking to the social media platform, Chelsea tweeted, “Since I was 11, people in public have said they think I’m ugly. I would never comment on relative beauty. It’s gross.” Continuing, she addressed the plastic surgery rumors with a wry note about why her face might look slightly different: “My chin is the one I was born with, just 38 years later.”
Protecting her own children from harassment
It would be bad enough for Chelsea Clinton to simply relive her childhood trauma with various people accusing her of wanting or even needing plastic surgery. However, she is the first to point out that she isn’t all that worried about such accusations because she’s been dealing with haters her whole life. Instead, as a mother, Chelsea is mostly worried about her kids experiencing similar trauma thanks to their famous mother.
As People reports, Chelsea Clinton mentioned her children when discussing social media during a 2023 CBS panel. “I am fiercely protective of my children’s privacy. They are the most important part of my life,” she said. “I would never show a picture of their faces or our family’s faces, and it would feel just weird to me to be on Instagram, a visual media, sharing the small moments of your life or big moments of your life.”
Chelsea did note that dealing with so many critics from an early age helped prepare her for “the online stuff, with all of its glory and gore.” With that being said, she is determined to make sure her own children don’t face the same harassment–offline and online–that she once did.