Consumers have been exposed to instances of celebrity domestic violence stories through the news, social media and online gossip media. Past studies showed that consumers have a tendency to overlook or even forgive the male celebrity’s violence behavior, and the celebrity appears to continue success in his career. Guided by attribution theory, this study investigates consumers' attribution and their consequent forgiveness or blame of the male celebrity’s violence behavior on his intimate partner. This study also takes into account celebrity past violent histories and philanthropy histories, as well as consumer individual differences (online media use and individual traits). The study employed a 2 (violence history: high vs. low) x 2 (Philanthropy history: high vs. low) between-subject, posttest-only design. 200 men and 200 women who lived in the US were recruited via Amazon Mechanic Turk to take part in the online study. The results support the proposed theoretical explanation. That is, consumers use a celebrity’s past histories as a cue to assign dispositional or situational attribution to the violent behavior and then blame or forgive the celebrity. The results also demonstrate that Facebook use and gossip site visits facilitate situational attribution, which has a significant positive influence on forgiveness. Implications for future research and suggestions for practice in public policy and marketing are discussed.

• Nora J. Rifon
• Mengtian Jiang
• Sookyong Kim
• Alisa P. Lertpratchya