Australian actress Rebel Wilson and fashion designer Ramona Agruma have had a fairytale romance, so it’s only fitting that they get engaged outside the Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland California!
“We said YES!” Wilson captioned on Instagram, beneath a picture of the couple posing with the ring while kissing in matching pink-and-white striped sweatshirts.
The Pitch Perfect star announced her relationship with Ramona Agruma in June 2022. “I thought I was searching for a Disney Prince,” the 42-year-old actress posted. “But maybe what I really needed all this time was a Disney Princess. #LoveIsLove.”
While people don’t always associate fairytales with adversity, it’s a genre convention that Wilson and Agruma know all too well.
The Sydney Morning Herald pressured Wilson to come out when a journalist contacted her, giving her 48 hours to provide an exclusive scoop on her relationship before the paper outed her with or without her consent. She decided to rid them of the power and announce her relationship before they could.
The journalist who sent the email during pride month, Andrew Hornery, is gay himself. He took the stance that reaching out to her first was with “respect.”
“As Rebel Wilson knows, we do not live in a perfect world,” he wrote in his Saturday column. “So, it was [with] an abundance of caution and respect that this media outlet emailed Rebel Wilson’s representatives on Thursday morning, giving her two days to comment on her new relationship with another woman, LA leisure wear designer Ramona Agruma, before publishing a single word.”
Hornery then attacked Wilson, arguing it was her who “opted to gazump the story,” as it was her “choice to ignore our discreet, genuine and honest queries,” which, in the paper’s view, was “underwhelming.”
The journalist has since back-pedalled on the tantrum and apologized: “My email was never intended to be a threat but to make it clear I was sufficiently confident with my information and to open a conversation.
“It is not the Herald’s business to ‘out’ people,” he continued. “That is not what we set out to do. But I understand why my email has been seen as a threat. The framing of it was a mistake.”
Whoopi Goldberg called bullshit on the apology.
“There’s a lot of speculation that Rebel came out to get ahead of a tabloid story in the Sydney Morning Herald about her relationship,” Goldberg said on The View.
“Now, the man who wrote it even apologized, saying it was ‘never his intention to out her’… Well, you know that’s not true,” she added.
“If it wasn’t your intention, you wouldn’t have done it. If you didn’t want to do it, you shouldn’t have done it. You knew exactly what you were doing.”
Later that year, Wilson broke her silence in an interview with one of SMH’s rival newspapers: The Australian. Rebel revealed how she was “threatened” to make her relationship public without her consent… and before she had shared the news with family and friends.
“Obviously, my relationship with Ramona is something that I wasn’t hiding in any way – it wasn’t a secret,” she told The Australian. However, there were loved ones who did not know yet. “Coming out in a same-sex relationship, there are levels to telling people,” the actress added.
Not everybody on both sides of the family will always be accepting, which Wilson indicates was true in she and Agruma’s case. “You tell your close family and your friends and not everybody. Across our two families not everybody is as accepting as what you’d hoped for, and we were trying to be respectful to those people and tell them in our own way. Basically, with the situation where a journalist is threatening to out you, you’ve got to hurry and some people we didn’t get a chance to tell before it came out publicly. And that’s not ideal.
“It was just a hard few days, especially for my partner who’s not used to being in the public eye and not used to having to deal with stuff like that. It was probably more harmful for her in many respects. But to me, in 2022, love is love. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal and that we should kind of be forced to make an announcement about it. But that happened.”
In true fairytale fashion, however, obstacles were overcome by hard work and love. Good triumphed over evil. Truth, and kindness, prevailed and the loved-up princesses publicly declared their intention to remain together ‘til death. Congratulations!
