The Biggest Controversies Surrounding Sabrina Carpenter

No, we’re not talking “Nonsense!” It girl, Sabrina Carpenter has stirred up some major controversies in her career, shocking enough to make even her die-hard fans’ jaws drop.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have probably heard of Carpenter’s name. If not, you have surely heard one of her many hit tracks on the radio. It seems that she has exploded out of nowhere with the single “Espresso” and followed it up with her first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, “Please Please Please.” However, Carpenter has been in the industry for a while now. She started as a child actor, appearing in different series since 2011. Eventually, she landed a reoccurring role on the Disney Channel network series “Girl Meets World.” She continued to act over the years and even found herself venturing into music.

In 2022, her acting career took a back seat with the release of her album “Emails I can’t send.” Carpenter’s passions seemed to lie more with music as she told Who What Wear in 2024, “I literally get to sing into a microphone. That’s my job. It’s everything that I’ve always wanted.” As time passed, the musician quickly solidified herself as a true pop star, now worth millions. But what’s a pop star without a little controversy? Carpenter has certainly had her fair share.

The internet hadn’t been invested in a Disney Channel love triangle like the one involving Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, and Joshua Bassett since the days of Nick Jonas, Miley Cyrus, and Selena Gomez. Conversation around the love triangle seemed to spark when Rodrigo released the 2021 track “Driver’s License.” In the song, the musician sings, “And you’re probably with that blonde girl / Who always made me doubt / She’s so much older than me / She’s everything I’m insecure about.” Rodrigo’s fans quickly went to work to discover who the “blonde girl” was, and all signs seemed to point to Carpenter.

According to Us Weekly, fans believe that “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” costars Bassett and Rodrigo dated sometime in 2020. However, they think Bassett either overlapped the relationship with the start of his romance with Carpenter or completely broke it off with Rodrigo to date Carpenter. Fans reached this conclusion because the “Girl Meets World” star began hanging out with Bassett in June 2020. The two even sported matching Halloween costumes that year, dressing up as Shark Boy and Lava Girl.

Carpenter became public enemy number one in the eyes of Rodrigo’s fanbase, with many accusing her of being a homewrecker, among many other nasty comments. To this day, it remains one of her biggest scandals, but she didn’t bite her tongue the whole time the drama went down.

Sabrina Carpenter wasn’t going to let the love triangle between her, Joshua Bassett, and Olivia Rodrigo go by without giving her side. Carpenter dropped her own response with a song titled “Skin” but denied it had anything to do with Rodrigo. She wrote in a now-deleted post (via Billboard), “[I] wasn’t bothered by a few lines in a (magnificent) song and wrote a diss track about it. i was at a tipping point in my life for countless reasons. so i was inspired to do what i usually do to cope, write something that i wish i could have told myself in the past.”

Although she was being coy about who the song was about, the lyrics were clear as day and obviously had to do with the infamous love triangle. In the song, she sings, “Maybe we could’ve been friends / If I met you in another life…Maybe you didn’t mean it / Maybe blonde was the only rhyme /The only rhyme.” If you didn’t notice it while reading the lyrics, Carpenter refers to the use of Rodrigo singing about a “blonde girl” in “Driver’s License.”

However, people were not happy that Carpenter made any sort of response to Rodrigo’s track. One person tweeted, “not her beefing with a 17 year old.” People were really upset with Carpenter’s release that seemingly responded to Rodrigo, and they did not hold back on sharing their opinion about it online.

Sabrina Carpenter’s music video for “Feather” caused quite a bit of chaos. Toward the end of the video, Carpenter appears in a funeral-themed scene taking place at a church. In a clever way, it seems the musician is saying her exes are dead to her and even has “RIP B***H” written on one of the coffins in the clip. There were a lot of people who loved the music video, but in a shocking twist, the church it was shot in did not.

According to The New York Times, Our Lady of Mount Carmel-Annunciation Parish wound up dismissing the priest who approved of the video. Msgr. Jamie J. Gigantiello apologized to the church’s community via a Facebook post, revealing he was trying to connect with the youth by approving Carpenter’s video. However, the details of the scene were not brought to his attention. He shared, “The parish staff and I were not aware that anything provocative was occurring in the church nor were we aware that faux coffins and other funeral items would be placed in the sanctuary.”

The controversy surrounding the situation reached Carpenter, who initially embraced it. She told Variety in November 2023 that they had gotten approval for the shoot. She also added, “…and Jesus was a carpenter.” However, just a month later, when she was asked again about the scandal, she seemed more reserved about saying anything. She said, “Gotta go, girl, gotta go, gotta go, gotta go.”

Sabrina Carpenter’s music career hasn’t been smooth sailing. At one point, the “Espresso” singer was sued by her former team. According to The Hollywood Reporter, in 2017, her former music managers, Stan Rogow and Elliot Lurie, filed a lawsuit claiming they were treated like trash and owed commissions. The pair sued Carpenter, her parents, and her manager, Bill Perlman. Rogow and Lurie said they joined her team in 2011 to help with her music career, and by doing so, they would receive some of Perlman’s commissions. Their attorney wrote, “Plaintiffs worked tirelessly to promote Sabrina and her music until their service were terminated, without cause.” After Rogow and Lurie were let go in 2014, they alleged they were owed money from her albums “Eyes Wide Open” and “Evolution.”

Carpenter wound up winning the lawsuit and took a jab at her former managers in the track “Sue Me.” Speaking about the track to UMusic, Carpenter shared, “It’s kind of that moment when you’re at your best, and you have people that didn’t really treat you right when you were at your worst, and they come crawling back, and it’s kind of that message to them of, ‘No I’m doing this on my own if you like it or not.'” Carpenter never confirmed it was about her former managers, though it seemed obvious to many that it was. 

One of Sabrina Carpenter’s most popular tracks, titled “Nonsense,” became big because of the ad-libs. During the last verse, Carpenter always switches up the lyrics to fit the location she is performing at, and typically, it has to do with something naughty. For example, the musician referenced her beau Barry Keoghan’s famous bath scene in “Saltburn” while performing at Coachella 2024. She sang, “Man, his knees so weak he had to spread mine / He’s drinkin’ my bath water like it’s red wine / Coachella, see you back here when I headline.” The “Nonsense” ad-libs are something that everyone looks forward to, so when she took on the BBC Lounge, people were excited to see what she would come up with.

According to The Evening Standard, while performing at BBC, Carpenter wound up ad-libbing, “I’m American I am not British / So BBC it stands for something different /This live lounge is so lit because I’m in it, innit.” The musician made a nod to the BBC, otherwise known as the British Broadcasting Corporation. However, she also made an innuendo to a sexual term tied to African American men.

Many thought the ad-lib was a bit much, and the performance wound up being removed from BBC’s website and its social media platforms. Although they never confirmed the reason for the removal, BBC later uploaded the video with the ad-libs edited out, seemingly backing that it had to do with the explicit lyrics.