Samantha Hudson has taken her activism back to the streets. The artist, singer, and content creator participated this Wednesday in the demonstrations of the general strike of 11 November and denounced that she had been sprayed with pepper spray during charges by the National Police on the Gran Vía in Madrid. "Doing nothing, they came straight for us," she said to the media, visibly affected.
Alongside her were the journalist María Barrier, with whom she shares the podcast Bimboficadas, and the actress Laura Weissmahr. The three were taking part in the protest when riot police intervened to clear the roadway, occupied by protesters for about two hours.
"We were at the front line without using violence and they pushed us up against the sidewalk," Hudson explained. According to Barrier's account, the agents used the aerosol directly against their eyes and respiratory pathways, when they could no longer back up.
Hudson's presence at the strike is not unrelated to her trajectory. The defense of labor rights, class consciousness, feminism, and the fight against discrimination against LGTBI people are part of her public discourse, both in her appearances and in her songs. Although her popularity was born on the internet, she has used that visibility to take part in political and social debates.
Who is Samantha Hudson and how did she become famous
Born in León in 1999 and raised in Mallorca, Samantha Hudson began to become known as a teenager. At 15, she recorded Maricón, a music video made as a school assignment in which she criticized the Catholic Church and its relationship with homosexuality.
The song sparked a controversy that went beyond the school. The Bishop's Office of Mallorca and conservative organizations questioned the video, while the controversy multiplied its spread on the internet. That experience ended up becoming one of the decisive episodes of her career.
Since then, she has developed a career that combines electronic music, stage performances, television, film, and social media. In 2021 she published Total liquidation, a project in which religious and political satire had a prominent weight. One of her best-known tracks, For Spain, uses symbols associated with Spanish nationalism to build a parody of her speeches.
In 2023, she received the MTV Europe Music Award for best Spanish artist, and in 2025 she published Música para muñecas, an album in which she addressed issues such as precarity, identity, and the contradictions of contemporary life.
Anti-fascism and class awareness
Hudson has never hidden her political positions. In an interview with The Huffington Post, she explained that she identified with "Marxist and communist shades and nuances" and argued that social demands must include a class perspective.
Her criticism also extends to the commodification of causes such as feminism or LGTBI Pride. She has questioned that companies use these movements in their advertising campaigns while maintaining working conditions that she considers incompatible with the rights they say they defend.
In 2022, she even described herself on Cadena SER as "the Norma Duval of the left," a definition that sums up the mix of spectacle, provocation, and political positioning with which she has built her public persona.
That class awareness also explains her closeness to labor and neighborhood demands. For Hudson, discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation cannot be analyzed separately from economic inequalities.
A critical LGTBI activist of both the right and also the left
The defense of trans people and of sexual diversity takes a central place in her public interventions. Hudson has repeatedly denounced the use of LGTBI identities as an instrument of political confrontation and has criticized transphobic rhetoric from both conservative sectors and spaces that identify with the left.
In an interview with El Español in 2025, she expressly defined herself as a person of the left, although she also lamented the fragmentation of that political space and the disenchantment of part of its supporters.
Her relationship with the Catholic Church is another of the recurring issues in her career. Despite her criticisms of the institution and her positions on sexual diversity, she has distinguished between church hierarchy and religious freedom, which she says she defends.
Doing politics without campaigning for a party
Although her statements often have an explicitly political content, Hudson has rejected dedicating herself to institutional politics.
"No, I think my language is different," he replied when El Español asked him in 2025 whether he would accept joining a party. In that interview, he asserted the work of social centers and of neighborhood organizations as forms of political participation outside of institutions.
In 2024, he had already expressed a similar idea, when he argued that the great social achievements had come thanks to citizen mobilization and to the organization of neighborhoods and the labor movement.
His participation in the general strike of 11N connects with that way of understanding activism. This Wednesday, far from limiting himself to commenting on the call through his social networks, Hudson was among those who were protesting in the center of Madrid when the police charges took place.