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Welcome to the third edition of The Internet Inside of My Mind, a weekly gathering of the most absurd and sometimes mundane things on the Internet. Except this week, it’s just one topic, and it’s not absurd at all.

On Wednesday, news of the passing of Irish singer, songwriter and activist Sinéad O’Connor spread across both traditional and social media. Among that coverage were stories of her generosity and advocacy, about time and resources sent to charitable causes and how she repeatedly used her platform to stand up for other disenfranchised people. Even in the most well-meaning and kind coverage of O’Connor’s death, one word that kept coming up was “controversial.” She was a “controversial figure,” or it was that “one controversial incident.” Hidden within those words is an ages-old tale: when a woman stands firm in her beliefs, she receives scorn and contempt in return. The career-defining incident that cost O’Connor most of her commercial success was her 1992 Saturday Night Live performance, where she ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II (which, reportedly, belonged to her mother, whom O’Connor shared abused her through her childhood).

In the 30 years since the SNL "incident,” with scores of proof backing her up, the public softened its stance on the award-winning singer. But O’Connor didn’t soften, and she never backed down.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1966, religion colored O’Connor’s life from a young age; her parents were strict Catholics, and she attended one of the oldest girl’s schools in Ireland, founded by The Dominican Order. At 15, she was sent to one of the country’s infamous Magdalene Laundries, essentially penitentiary workhouses for “unruly” women. These religious institutions were popular in the 19th and 20th centuries. At one point, there were 900 of them in the U.K. Later accounts of the laundries by historians and survivors detail conditions worse than some prisons, with exhaustive labor and cruel staff.

Cruelty was, unfortunately, another central theme in O’Connor’s life; the singer was candid about the physical and emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents and others. In an open letter published in The Irish Times on June 10, 1993, the singer wrote:

My name is Sinéad O'Connor… Who was tortured and abandoned and spat at and abused. Who has been beaten naked until she was bruised. Who has grown up with no sense of self-esteem. No sense of trust.

By the time that letter was published, O’Connor was already famous. This was three years after her number one Billboard song, “Nothing Compares 2 U” (a cover of singer Prince’s song; the two singers had a strange relationship, to say the least) from her critically acclaimed sophomore album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. Around that same time, the singer refused to accept a Grammy Award in 1991, a move that saw her in solidarity with hip hop group Public Enemy, who boycotted the award ceremony (they had their own grievances with the Recording Academy, which treated rap and hip hop disparately compared to rock n’ roll, pop and other music genres).

This was also after the incident that would define her career, turn her into an industry pariah, and put a target on her back for years.

By now, we all know the story but humor me. During a live performance on U.S. late-night variety sketch program, Saturday Night Live, O’Connor pulled out a photograph of the then-leader of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II, and ripped it up on live television. The singer had previously asked if she could sing an acapella rendition of Bob Marley’s War, and at the exact moment she ripped up the photo; she sang the words, “Fight the real enemy.”

The backlash was instantaneous and deafening. The Catholic Church demanded an apology, scores of good Christians called into television and radio stations to declare her a pariah, and the entertainment industry all but turned on her. Catholic-raised actor Joe Pesci went on as SNL host the following week and said had he been in the studio that day, he would have “given her [O’Connor] a smack.”

Even Madonna, another singer who previously found herself in hot water with the Catholic Church, chimed in with her criticism. Noting in an interview with The Irish Times, “I think there’s a better way to present her ideas rather than ripping up an image that means a lot to other people.” In retrospect, I wonder if Madge finds her words hypocritical, considering that when she released the music video for 1989’s Like a Prayer, the same Pope publicly condemned the music video, which featured burning crosses and a Black Jesus. The backlash was so bad that Madonna’s $5 million deal with Pepsi was canceled.

When asked why she did what she did, O’Connor stood firm, stating that it was in protest of the Catholic Church's cover-up of sex crimes against children.

And she was right.

One of the Catholic Cardinals who called for her to apologize, telling the Boston Globe that it was "a gesture of hate" and "neo-anti-Catholicism," ended up resigning a decade later for his part in covering up the abuse O’Connor was trying to shed light on. He died peacefully in Rome in 2017, suffering less scorn for his part in covering up the abuse than O’Connor did for her role as the whistleblower.

It turns out that O’Connor’s actual crime was blowing the whistle and being the first. The first person to publicly speak out about the widespread abuse happening in the church. Similarly, she was also one of the first celebrities to lend her voice to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, appearing in advertisements for condoms in the U.K., playing at Pride in 1988, and presenting a program on HIV for ITV in 1990, a time when the disease was heavily ostracised, patients were left in dark rooms to die, and elected officials turned a blind eye to the public health emergency.

Conventional history would tell us that O’Connor’s career came to a standstill after 1992, but that’s simply not true. The mother of four released eight more studio albums and collaborated with many people and organizations. She was nominated for, and won, more awards; she toured with Lollapalooza and played at Carnegie Hall. More recently, she released a cover of gospel icon Mahalia Jackson’s Trouble of the World, with benefits from the single’s sales going to BLM charities. Earlier this year, her cover of a 19th-century song, “The Skye Boat Song,” served as the theme for the popular drama series Outlander.

What others saw as derailment, O’Connor saw as a re-alignment. In her 2021 memoir, Rememebrings, the singer wrote:

But it was not derailing; people say, ‘Oh you f**ked up your career,’ but they’re talking about the career they had in mind for me. I f**ked up the house in Antigua that the record company dudes wanted to buy. I f**ked up their career, not mine. It meant that I had to make my living playing live, and I am born for live performance.”

That’s not to say that she was stable in her beliefs; the Grammy Award-winning singer’s life was peppered with inconsistencies. She shunned her Catholic upbringing before becoming an ordained minister, and later converted to Islam in 2019, taking the name Shuhada’ Davitt (her Muslim conversion isn’t a major talking point in the many obituaries published since her passing) and declaring that Sinéad O’Connor was “gone.” She supported and then unsupported the Irish Republic Army (IRA) and oscillated on her sexuality, stating that she was “three-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gay” at one point (Note: the singer married four times and had four children; her third-born son, Shane, died tragically by suicide in 2022). While she was a woman of contradictions, she was also an artist, an advocate, an ally, and uncomfortably ahead of her time.

In her 56 years of living, O’Connor dared to say, think and be the voice she so desperately needed as a child. Her public, ongoing battle with mental illness made it easy to write her off as erratic or unreliable, but she was right in so many ways, it just took too long for the rest of the world to see it, and she suffered the consequences.

That’s the thing about being strong in a world that feeds off of women’s weakness; you will be punished for it. You will be ostracized and shunned and made out to be the villain. You’ll be threatened, intimidated, asked to recant, and jeered. Your shortcomings? Fodder for the pitchfork masses. Your accomplishments? Minimized as unimportant and uneventful. Your life? Summed up in one word: “controversial.”

Given the same choice, I am not sure I could pull off what Sinéad O’Connor did; not many of us could.

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