Rita Ora has claimed her former record label discriminated against her because she’s female.
The ‘Girls’ singer previously filed a lawsuit to get out of her contract with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, accusing them of neglecting her in favour of other artists, before they countersued and then settled the case in 2016, and though she insists the split from her label was anicable, she thinks she’d have had a "better chance" if she was a man.
She said "I want to find the right word here, and maybe this is my interpretation,but I do feel I got discriminated against because I was a woman.
"I almost felt — maybe this is just my interpretation — I could have had a better chance if I’d been male."
These days, Rita’s business manager is her older sister Elena, and though they don’t always get along, she’s "proud" of their achievements.
She told the Sunday Times magazine: "To be honest, I’d always wanted to become a household name [not just a pop singer], that was my dream.
"My sister and I, we argue like crazy all the time, but we’re very proud of what we’ve done up to this point."
The 27-year-old singer was previously rumoured to have had an affair with Jay because of the "Becky with the good hair" reference in the rapper’s wife Beyonce’s track ‘Sorry’, but Rita insists that’s far from the truth.
She quipped: "Hey, all I want to say to that is, dude, if I were BWTGH, wouldn’t I actually have to have good hair? Look at it. It’s all weave and extensions.
"And, I mean, Beyoncé? Omigod. She’s the nicest person, bestest person I have ever met in the whole industry. I’m not just saying that. I’d die for her.
"Nobody can ever say anything wrong about that woman in front of me. I get emotional just talking about it."
Rita – who is now dating songwriter Andrew Watt – went through a bitter public split from Calvin Harris in 2014 which prompted him to stop her from performing ‘I Will Never Let You Down’, a single he’d written for her, but she insists she and the DJ get on well these days.
She said: "Yeah, I was very young then, though.
"It was my peak of just realising for the first time that I was killing it, and I don’t want to speak for him because we’re in a really good place now."
Rita Ora suggests record label sexism
