I’ve lately been asking people whether they think they could be friends with Margot Robbie.

The most common response is “what do you mean by that?”, which I guess is fair, so I usually describe it like this:

Imagine that Margot Robbie shows up at some kind of social event that you’re attending. She strikes up a conversation with you, gets your phone number, and then later, texts you to see if you want to hang out. Maybe that’s coming on a little strong to your tastes, so instead you can imagine she meets you a few times over the course of a month via random encounters and you start to get to know one another. Her qualities as a person aside, she’s one of the most famous people in America and a multi-millionaire. Could you be friends with her, or would all that stuff get in the way?

I’ve gotten a lot of different answers to that question. My own is, “yeah, whatever initial feelings, she would very quickly be revealed to be Just a Person” but other people have taken more nuanced approaches:

Well, I think I could be fine around her, but … you know how they say that men and women can’t be friends? I don’t believe that, but the gender dynamics, they’re always there. I think it would be the same. I’d always be aware of the fame and money.

And another:

I think I’d feel unworthy. I’d be sitting there wondering, ‘why me?’ and if I was brave enough to ask that, I don’t think she’d have a good answer. So I’d be uneasy with her all the time, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And from my lovely wife:

I think sure, but there’d be paparazzi, and they’d wonder who I am. I wouldn’t want to see a newspaper with “Margot Robbie’s weird dumpy friend, maybe make-a-wish?” on it.

But the answer that interested me most was this one:

No, never. Margot Robbie could destroy me.

And I thought “wait, could she?”

Could Margot Robbie Financially Destroy Me?

Margot Robbie has an estimated $60 million dollars, which is a lot.1

The best path for Margot Robbie to go after me financially would be to file multiple frivolous lawsuits in different jurisdictions, which would require me to respond, even if I was stupidly acting as my own representative. There are anti-SLAPP laws to prevent this, but they vary by jurisdiction, and likely what would happen is that I would pay for my own lawyers and then get drowned in discovery or drain my savings until I had to sell my house and worldly belongings. Even a baseless claim of defamation or libel would take time, money, and personal stress to deal with.

An alternate path would be through hiring an army of private investigators. They could photograph me all the time, engaging in either covert surveillance or borderline harassment, and then report on me through tip lines or other mechanisms to try to trigger an audit, or a citation from the city for a fence being three inches too high, or something like that. I think my house is up to code and my permits are up to date, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it, and likely there’s some relatively innocuous violation that would require my time, attention, and money to fix.

I personally don’t have any professional license that could be gone after, and I’m not part of an HOA, so those avenues aren’t available attack vectors for Margot Robbie.

So I’ll list this one as plausible.

Could Margot Robbie Socially Destroy Me?

For me specifically? I don’t know. I don’t have that many friends, mostly because I get my fill of social interaction from my wife and son, and from weekly visits with my extended family. I have a fair number of people who I enjoy hanging out with, I just don’t do it that often. I have a good time with the board gaming group, but I don’t go as often as I feel like I should, because I think “ah, I could stay home instead”. I have a bunch of online friends, and friends who live in other cities.

Margot Robbie has a huge amount of reach, but I think if she went after me socially she wouldn’t be able to leverage the vast majority of it. She has fans, but how many of those fans are willing to harass some random guy? How much would people pay any attention? My naïve feeling is very little, but I’m not super online and miss a lot. She’d have to make some specific claims against me, and probably lie, though I have an enormous online footprint that someone could dig through, and maybe there’s something in there, if you can be assed.

I spoke to my lovely wife about this, and she pointed out that Margot Robbie could falsely accuse me of rape. So there’s that, I guess.

Could Margot Robbie Professionally Destroy Me?

I’m a writer who doesn’t work in or anywhere near Hollywood, so I think my answer is “it would be hard”. She could probably get my agent to drop me, but it would probably take a lot for her to remove my books from Amazon or get my Patreon numbers or RoyalRoad readership to drop dramatically. In fact, anything that she did which came to the attention of the media would be likely to increase my income, even if that’s a trade-off I don’t think I would want to make. I’ve never been a big believer that all publicity is good publicity, but in this case I think that’s correct.

What she’d want to instead do is go behind the scenes. She probably could go to my publishers and get them to drop me, as well as get me blacklisted. She assuredly has contacts, and I wouldn’t doubt that those contacts have fingers in the publishing world. She has money, which she could dangle in front of companies to get them not to work with me. This is, from my perspective, not super concerning, but mostly because it seems like a ton of sustained effort for relatively minimal impact on me. Though maybe she could exert pressure and get me dropped from Patreon or get my books taken off Kindle? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that happening to someone, but maybe, with the right fabricated evidence or rumors or just public pressure following a smear campaign.

For most other people, Margot Robbie’s ability to impact their professional life is much much higher. Other people have bosses, they have networking they have to worry about, they need to care deeply about how they appear in the eyes of others, at least in their professional lives, and a spare word from Margot Robbie might be enough that this sticks to their name when you search for them, swamping anything else they might have done.

Could Margot Robbie Physically Destroy Me?

Unambiguously, yes. My understanding is that while the hit itself might be easy when targeted against someone like myself, hiring a hitman is likely to run into all kinds of stings or scams. I don’t know how difficult it would be for Margot Robbie to get in touch with criminals — the easiest way to get an actual hitman — but my guess is that she could do it, even if she would be putting herself in a position of enormous risk and vulnerability in the course of making those contacts and hiring the hitman. She’d be ripe for blackmail, but a bloodlusted Margot Robbie wouldn’t be stopped by that.

Or she could do it herself, obviously. The private investigators could track me down if she couldn’t figure that out herself, then she’d just need to fly to see me, buy a gun, and take her shot. Now, I’ve never killed a person, but everyone says that in the moment it takes more willpower than you’d think, and in spite of my feeling that it can’t be that hard, I’ll take them at their word. So I don’t know whether Margot Robbie is psychologically equipped to murder me, and hopefully I never find out.

But most people could also physically destroy me, so long as they have the capacity to buy a gun and find me.2 So in this respect, Margot Robbie is not particularly exceptional.

Could Margot Robbie Psychologically Destroy Me?

You know, I was going to say “probably not”, but on further reflection, I think she would have a path, and that path would depend on not just her fame and money, but on her personal training as an actor. This is considered separately from her ability to impact my reputation or social life, but they admittedly overlap.

I think Margot Robbie is probably in the top one percent of social skills, just on the basis of her chosen profession. If she wanted to become my friend, the primary thing stopping her would be that I don’t feel like I have a great need for friends, and tend to make friends and then dial back interactions until I’m at my normal baseline of friend-need, which is not high. She’d have to study me psychologically and find the correct pressure points, and then apply that pressure in such a way that I didn’t find personally off-putting, maybe by offering me all the things that I want in life. I don’t know, maybe she would say, ‘Hey, I randomly got recommended some of your work and I adore it, working with some people on movie rights now but I’d love to talk with you about it’ and that would definitely work on me.3

And then once she’d put herself in a position of proximity and power, there are probably a few different ways to break me. I’m aware of my own reactions to intense stress and while I think I’ve developed healthy coping strategies, I’m not sure that they would hold up to repeated hammer blows coming from multiple different directions, especially if it didn’t seem coordinated to me.

So, Yes?

I don’t know. I guess, looking at the facts, yes, there are many ways in which Margot Robbie could destroy me. I just think that almost all of those ways are extremely costly to her for virtually no gain, and if you’re a celebrity who has a falling out with a friend, there are simply enormous asymmetries in the direction of the friend, who can get things for betraying whatever confidence and trust you might have had.

So I guess my feeling is that there are lots of ways for people to destroy each other, and that I don’t feel any particular threat or concern from someone like Margot Robbie. Honestly, I think the incentive structures probably mean that Margot Robbie has more to fear from me, but I’m not inclined to write a follow-up post, “Could I Destroy Margot Robbie?”