Lizzo's Legal Year: The Weight-Loss Statement, the Dismissal, and What's Still in Court

A federal judge in the Central District of California dismissed the remaining claims against Big Grrrl Big Touring Inc., Lizzo's touring company, on September 1, 2026, ending a lawsuit brought by former wardrobe stylist Asha Daniels. Rolling Stone, Billboard, TheGrio, NBC News and TMZ all covered the ruling — five bylines describing the same court order, not five separate confirmations of it. Per that reporting, Judge Fernando L. Aenlle-Rocha found Daniels had failed to identify conduct by company employees demonstrating "general hostility" to women in the workplace or disparate treatment between men and women. Lizzo herself wasn't a defendant by the time this ruling landed — her attorney says she was dismissed from this specific case personally in December 2024. What ended this week was the case against her company, not a case against her.

Photo by Andy Witchger, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Daniels, through attorney Ron Zambrano, said in a statement to Billboard that the ruling "improperly weighed evidence that should have been evaluated by a jury" and that the court assessed incidents "too narrowly ... rather than considering their cumulative impact." Her legal team is "considering appropriate next steps," the statement added — not, as of this writing, a filed appeal. Lizzo posted her own response the same day: "The truth has prevailed," she said, thanking her legal team. Both statements describe the same ruling from opposite sides of it, and neither has the last word yet.

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Lizzo's own account of the weight loss predates this week's ruling by nine months and answers a different question than the dismissal does. In a Substack essay dated November 23, 2025, she wrote: "I started losing weight in the fall of 2023. I was severely depressed. I had been the subject of a vicious scandal, and it felt like the whole world turned its back on me. I became deeply suicidal." She described the isolation that followed — "I couldn't go out and defend myself. I couldn't tell the world the truth because no one would believe me" — and traced the change to that period rather than to any program or product named in the essay itself.

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A detail attached to that essay in a lot of the coverage around it — that she used Ozempic — doesn't actually come from a personal admission in the essay itself. The Substack post does use the word once, in the phrase "the ozempic boom," as shorthand for a broader industry shift — it opens with a note that the term "is not a demonization of Glp-1s and the people who use them" — but it never states that she personally took one; that admission comes from a separate appearance, on the June 19, 2025 episode of the Just Trish podcast, reported the same day by E! News, where Lizzo said: "Ozempic works because you eat less food, yeah? So if you eat right, it makes you feel full. But if you can just do that on your own and get mind over matter, it's the same thing" — describing having tried it and moved to diet and exercise instead. About a year later, at the June 2026 BET Awards, she wore a sheer, crystal-netted Christian Cowan gown while promoting her new album, Bitch — an appearance widely reported, including by Hola, as showcasing a 60-pound weight loss, a figure that comes from that coverage rather than from any number Lizzo has put on it herself.

Photo by Dowlinme, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A separate, still-active case cuts against that narrative in an uncomfortable way. Three former backup dancers — Arianna Davis, Crystal Williams and Noelle Rodriguez — sued Lizzo and her company in 2023, alleging sexual, religious and racial harassment and a hostile work environment, and specifically alleging that Lizzo and a tour choreographer called attention to Davis's weight gain and that Davis was fired following those comments. Lizzo has denied it since the suit was filed: "I would absolutely never criticize or terminate an employee because of their weight," she said in an August 2023 statement, adding she was "not the villain" she'd been made out to be. In February 2024, a judge dismissed that specific weight-shaming claim, citing insufficient evidence and pointing instead to the dancers having been let go after secretly recording a private meeting — while allowing the suit's other claims, including allegations tied to a 2023 visit to an Amsterdam club, to proceed.

The dancers appealed that dismissal, then dropped the appeal — first reported by TMZ on December 12, 2025, with TheGrio and a TMZ follow-up covering Lizzo's response three days later. Lizzo responded on Instagram and TikTok: "The fat-shaming claims against me have been officially dropped by my accusers. They conceded it had no merit in court." What remains of the case — sexual harassment, hostile-work-environment and related claims, none of them about weight — is still active as of this writing. Named-outlet reporting located for this piece does not establish a confirmed 2026 trial date, and none is adopted here. That leaves two threads running on separate tiers of evidence at the same time: Lizzo's own, on-the-record account of a weight change she says trauma set in motion, and a lawsuit whose central weight-related claim has already been dismissed once, alleging that she once did to a dancer's body something like what happened to her own. Neither resolves the other. Both are accurate statements about where things stand today.